Breathe
by Solus Nemo
Summary: What the Winchester brothers thought would be an easy hunt has turned into something much more sinister, when their game turns and begins to hunt them.
1. One

**Title:** Breathe  
**Author: **"Solus Nemo"  
**Summary:** What the Winchester brothers thought would be an easy hunt has turned into something much more sinister, when their game turns and begins to hunt them.  
**Author's Note: **There really is a place called Arrowsic, Maine. It's an island near Portland with a population of about 477 and for the sake of this story I needed to fictionalize it a bit. I'm so sorry to anyone who reads my stories and lives there, but I can't exactly use an island here in Wisconsin because we don't have any. Besides, New England forever. **Only the first chapter is in present tense.**

Rating for violence, adult language and themes.  
**Disclaimer:** I don't even work as a piece of chewed gum for Warner Brothers. That should help you in knowing that I don't own "Supernatural" or anything else even remotely related to the show. I only own the story which you are about to read (which is one hundred percent fiction, by the way) and whatever characters and/or world history I pulled from my mind.

**Chapter One ; Let's Play God**

Something is very wrong here, very very wrong.

Adam isn't in his room anymore. Nope, he's not. That cozy room on the top floor, in the attic, with the almost naked girl posters plastered all over his ceiling and the stereo system he saved up for months to buy – that's gone away, but he can't remember actually leaving it. That's strange enough, not remembering getting out of his big warm bed and coming to a place like this, but what's stranger is what this room is like.

He certainly would've remembered leaving his house (at some ungodly hour of the morning his mother'll slaughter him for) and coming _here_. Here looks like some kind of basement, but not Adam's basement. Adam's house is an old Victorian, a white and blue one registered on some kind of list, and its basement doesn't have concrete ceilings like this room does. The ceiling here, in this strange place, is green and blue and yellow with some kind of slimy substance that Adam really hopes won't drip down onto his face because that's just gross. Really, really gross.

This is a foreign ceiling to him, he doesn't remember ever coming to a place with such a puke-chuck-ralph inducing concrete ceiling. There aren't many places on the island that would have a concrete ceiling anyway, so if Adam had ever come here he would have remembered. But maybe he has been here before – how many people look at ceilings all day?

Just look around, get your bearings, and then go home before Dad takes out the belt. That's all you have to do and it isn't going to take any time at all. Just look around. That's easier said than done because Adam can't look around, he's having trouble moving his head. Not just his head, either, but his whole body. His _whole body _doesn't want to listen to his brain, is boycotting taking commands from his head and decides to lay like a wet noodle on the floor.

So maybe he'll ask for help. He couldn't have come here alone, not to a vile pit like this one, so he'll simply call out like they do in movies – "Is anybody here?" – and whoever answers can help him home. At least he has an excuse to give his parents now.

"_I was sleepwalking or something, right? And when I woke up I couldn't move so I had to ask someone to help me home."_

What if his parents don't believe him? He's never sleepwalked before and they might think he's lying if he tells them something like that. What else could it have been, though? He had to have been sleepwalking else he'd remember coming here. This isn't some sort of dream, either, because it's too real.

So, yeah, that's what he'll do: call out for somebody to help him. The sooner he does that the sooner he can be lying in bed under his Pamela Anderson poster, the one to the left of Juliya Chernetsky and just below Gisele Bündchen. He'll be spending a lot of time with them when he gets home, he'll surely as the sun rises be grounding for this little stunt. But it won't be so severely if he calls out soon and gets home quickly.

"Hello? Anyone there?"

That's what Adam says in his mind, anyway, because the words coming out of his mouth are deformed. There's something in his mouth – why didn't he realize that before? – and it's like a horse bridle or whatever those things are called. He's not into horses so he's never cared to know. Abby would know, his sister Abby. The annoying eight-year-old with the affinity for any kind of horse under the sun, the one who he has to drive to school every stinking day, she'd know.

But Abby's not here so Adam just has to call this thing in his mouth a horse bridle and be done with it. Now he has to start wondering why it's in his mouth and why he can't move. Thinking about it more it's like he's strapped down to the floor and that's why he can't move, and his head's in a vice or something because the only way it'll go is straight up – giving him the displeasing view of the ceiling.

This is starting to get scary now, really really scary.

_Adam Sanders, 18, found gagged and bound in some creepy, slimy-ass basement in Arrowsic, Maine._

The paper headlines were going to say that if Adam didn't get his carrot orange locks out of this place soon. While he'd love some publicity, getting killed by some psycho lunatic isn't number one on his Things To Do list. But, let's face it, he's not MacGyver and isn't exactly smart enough to spring himself out of here with a piece of string and some chewing gum, if he even chewed gum. Getting killed in this freaky place by some random fruit cake was most likely going to happen.

Fuck, and he never got the chance to ask Marcy Ward to the year-end formal.

Maybe he still can if he can loosen the straps around his wrists and ankles. It won't hurt to try, can't possibly make the situation any worse, so why not go and do it. Just bang your fists down on the floor – no, it's a table because floors don't make empty, metallic, thwacking sounds. Bang, bang, bang. Bang, bang. Bang, until they get loose enough to slip your hands out of them or until they come off the table completely. Same with the feet. Bang, bang, bang.

No dice. Adam's too tightly strapped down to move his hands and feet enough to try and free himself. He's stuck. Stuck in a head vice and tied down to a table like one of those crazies in the old horror movies, the ones with the lunatic doctor performing surgeries on his Loony Barn patients while they're still very much awake.

No, stop thinking about that. He's seen enough of those movies to be thoroughly freaked the fuck out by thinking about them.

So stop thinking about them, numbnuts, and get yourself out of here.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Good idea, but how am I suppose to do that?

Don't know, I'm just the voice in your head.

Desperate now. Adam Sanders is desperately scared and wants to go home and have some fun with his girlie posters. That's what normal teenage boys do, have some fun with their girlie posters, not hang around in a basement, strapped to a metal table under a slimy ceiling.

Thrash, twist, turn. Rock, try to rock the table over – no! Bad idea, a broken arm isn't going to get Adam anywhere closer to his attic bedroom with the dirty magazines hidden under a loose floorboard. He'll never get home, though, if he doesn't try something. But what's he suppose to try if he can't move at all?

A single, short lived sound stops Adam dead cold. He's not struggling anymore, but listening. Listening to hear that sound again, the scrape of shoe heel against concrete floor.

Maybe his imagination's picked up intensity in the situation, but just in case he didn't imagine that noise Adam stops breathing. He'd stop his heart, too, if it was at all possible to do that and keep on living. But he needs absolute silence in order to hear, really hear, everything in the room.

And there is it again! He didn't imagine it at all because there it was. His heart's hammering in his chest now, acting like a wild ape trying to tear down the bars of its cage, because the sound was much closer this time. It sounded like it came from right next to Adam – oh, Christ – right next to him, it was so close.

Adam's breath is caught in his throat, his ears are buzzing from intensity, and his body's so stiff his sister could use him as a ladder to get up on her horse, Brownie. Even his eyes hurt, he's been staring at one bluish green slime blob on the ceiling so hard. But wait a second–

Oh, God, it's an eye! A blue-green eye with it's mate in a man's skull that just appeared out of nowhere when Adam blinked. Oh, God, the psycho lunatic's come for him. Oh, God!

He starts screaming now through his horse bridle-like gag, starts trying to set himself free with the fervor of a bird in a cat's mouth. He shuts his eyes and opens them – open, close, open, close, open – but the man looking down at him won't go away and it's just like Adam feared. The man's a doctor, a doctor with the eyes of a loony, and he's just staring down at Adam and won't dematerialize away.

There's a nurse behind him, a foreign sounding nurse, who calls over from someplace out of Adam's square of slimy ceiling that it's ready, "doktorr", it's ready. Oh, God, what's ready? What's ready?

And the doctor keeps staring down at his patient, smiling behind his whatchamacallit face mask – one of those really ancient looking face masks covered in blood with a matching white, dried blood stained hat – and says to the soon-to-be-dead Arrowic boy, "We'll take very good care of you, Adam." Jesus, he knows his name! He knows his name and he's acting like everything's going to be okay, but it's not. Oh, God in Heaven, it's not! It's not!

Crying now, Adam's crying, and he's thrashing and he's twisting and he's banging the table. But nothing works, nothing. And the doctor with the blue-green eyes keeps on staring and smiling and then he holds up a rusty medical skewer only it's much worse than rust, it's more dried blood.

"Calm down, Mr. Sanders," the doctor's telling him in a calm but frightening voice. "Calm down and this will be over with in no time at all. We'll fix you up good as new."

Fix up? _Fix up?_

No, no, no! Adam just wants to go home, he doesn't need to be fixed up because he just wants to go home! He just wants to go back to bed and sleep under Marilyn Monroe and Pamela, under his Victoria's Secret models and his Fuse VJ. No fixing up, just a trip home!

"Still, Adam. You need to stay still so I don't miss and drive this where I don't want to," the doctor's saying. "Like your eye." And then he puts one hand on Adam's head and pushes down and takes the poker and puts it right above his left eye, presses down until the weight between his eye and that supraorbital bone thing – he slept through that part of health class, fucking Christ – until his vision blurs in that eye and now he's panicking even more.

And here comes the pain – Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the pain! He can feel everything, _everything_, and it hurts so much. The skewer's crashing into his brain and it's being swirled around and around and it hurts so bad, and the doctor won't stop laughing. And the nurse, the foreign nurse, she's laughing too. They're all laughing because it's hurting him so bad and he won't stop screaming and trying to get away.

But all of a sudden eighteen years stop flowing forward, stops flowing all together. The tide shifts and now everything's going backward. Adam can see the years going backward or maybe that's just his brain panicking, it does that when it's put under so much stress, but the years are turning backward. And there's blackness at the end of the line, he can see that too, such a rich velvety blackness he can't resist jumping into it when it comes to him.


	2. Two

1.) I still own only the words you're reading and not anything else, and 2.) The next chapter I promise will be longer, I'm just trying to spread these chapters out more than I did _SLL_.**  
**

**Chapter Two ; Angst Has a Body Count**

Sam Winchester was going insane, and he could _feel_ his decent into madness. It wasn't nearly as painful as he thought it would have been and he had to admit the notion of spending the rest of his days talking to the man in his thumb was strangely comforting. Carrying on long and detailed conversations with Tom Thumb about the aliens attacking Earth meant that Sam wouldn't have to play children's games with his moronic older brother, Dean.

Pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, Sam let out a hissing sigh. "I give up."

Dean, in his traditional driving pose (leaned back in the bucket seats of his mint 1967 Chevrolet Impala, right arm stretched out straight with hand on the upper hemisphere of the steering wheel, and left arm bent with elbow out the window), frowned. "Come on, Sammy, you only guessed three times."

"For the last time it's Sam," he barked, "and I couldn't care less about your little eye spying something starting with the letter C, or any other letter of the alphabet for that matter."

Scowling at the winding coastal road before him, Dean didn't let his voice lose its usual, casual light. "All right, Lucy Van Pelt. I spy with my little eye something that begins with the letter C, a curmudgeon – you."

"I really dislike you sometimes, you know that?"

"No," Dean replied, sarcasm dripping from his feigned shock, "I had no idea."

"Screw you."

Dean, it was impossible to deny, had a great smile and Sam hated him for that. "Absolutely not a problem for me. I don't know about you, though, and _please_ don't rush to show me."

Sam made a face that would have made one think he had just bit into a lemon. "Why do you always have to twist everything around to sex? It's embarrassing, makes me wish a hole would just open up under my feet and swallow me."

"You started it, Sammy."

He snorted angrily through his nose at that damn nickname. "I started it?" Sam asked shrilly. "I wouldn't have said anything if you hadn't roped me into yet another of your idiotic games. I'm not three anymore in case you haven't noticed."

"So shoot me for trying to bond with my little brother," Dean said stiffly. "I'm _so sorry _for wanting to spend some time with you outside of ghost busting. Excuse me for trying to make up for those years you wasted in college!" The knuckles of his right hand had gone white, he was holding onto the steering wheel with that much passion.

"Fuck you, Dean. At least I was trying to make something of my life," Sam shot back curtly.

Dean almost missed the sign beside the road warning of a sharp turn, the one that if he hadn't seen would have sent the brothers careening over the road and into the ocean. Maybe Dean wanted that to happen, but there was no way he was going to let his car get cancer of the frame from that salt water. "I have news for you, Sammy. This is your life now and it always was, it was just a matter of time before it came up and bit you in the ass. You were the one who ran away, so don't you dare start bitching at me about what life I did or didn't make for myself. While you were hiding behind your worthless text books, Dad and I were saving people. I _did_ make something of my life, you ungrateful little pissface."

Sam leaned toward the tape player and quite violently stopped its playing. The radio soon kicked in, set at a station that no longer was receiving a signal, and because Dean had put the volume up so high the buzzing and popping nearly deafened Sam in the right ear. That only made him more annoyed at the world and he came close to twisting the knob right off as he turned the volume down, began hunting for a station in a brooding silence that would have made any bear in the area yelp and run the other way.

It was pointless, Dean theorized as he listened to the irate grunts coming from his brother and whatever crappy country music/religious talk show station the radio picked up, to tell Sam that the K his little eye had spied was in actuality a kite. The bell had already rung and it was a little bit impossible to un-ring it. Best to let Sam stew for a while until he got sick of the silence and started talking again. That's what Dean always did and most of the time it worked.

But the sinking feeling in his stomach told him that today wasn't going to be one of those days. Sam had found a radio station to listen to and without dead silence in the car he could last hours without acknowledging the very fact that Dean "Stud Muffin" Winchester existed.

It was another talk show, what Sam had settled on, but it wasn't revolving around sinners and penance. The main topic, at the moment, was the Red Sox trade of their third base coach to the Milwaukee Brewers. The callers were very happy about that, euphoric even, and for a good ten minutes no one wanted to talk about anything else. It was annoying, but once that was done and over with they moved on to more important news – the mysterious death of a teenager.

"Eighteen-year-old Arrowsic Island, Maine resident Adam Sanders," the woman DJ announced, "was found dead earlier this morning by his parents. Sources tell us that he hadn't come down for breakfast and upon inspection Adam was found dead of a lobotomy in his bedroom, still lying under his bed covers. We're told that there are no signs of forced entry or struggle, no evidence to be found, and no leads. Earlier this month, you'll remember, we reported a similar death of another Arrowsic resident by the name of Danielle Harris, 22. Neither of the children's parents had heard anything out of the ordinary during the night."

A commercial then came in, a jingle about getting your car checked out at Jiffy Lube.

Why did that case sound so familiar to Dean? He knew he'd heard of something like that before, but he couldn't remember where. Some television show a few years ago, damn, what's-it-called.

At least Sam started to talk again, and calmly to boot. "That's strange, don't you think? Two kids killed in their beds painfully, but they didn't fight back and no one in the house heard anything. That might be something we should look into, especially since there's not a hint of evidence or forced entry. We're close enough to Arrowsic I think, being as we're right by the ocean."

"_Unsolved Mysteries_."

"What?" Sam asked.

"_Unsolved Mysteries_," Dean repeated. "That's where I heard of this before. A few years back they did a segment on Arrowsic – you're right about close, it's an island near enough to Portland. It turns out there've been a lot of murders there, but no one's ever been able to come up with anything."

Sam laughed. "And you call me a geek?"

"Just listen for a second, okay? All the people being killed there are young, teenagers to late twenties, and found in their homes without a single sign of foul play. It's like all of a sudden, out of nowhere, they get a lobotomy or their skulls are sawed open and a hunk of their brain is removed – always the same hunk, mind you. This has been going on for decades, right? But there hasn't been a doctor on that island for a long time, and no one with enough know-how of the human system to do anything like that lives there now."

"It could just be a serial killer who reads 'worthless text books'," Sam offered sourly. "But if there's no sign of foul play, that means that these people weren't injected with anything to put them to sleep – meaning that _someone_ should have heard _something_."

Dean nodded, choosing to fly over his brother's earlier text book repetition. "Yeah, we should definitely look into this."

He stopped the car in the middle of the road and made a u-turn – a very difficult u-turn because Impala's are long cars that don't turn on a dime, more like the pan for the biggest pizza ever made. For about three seconds Dean was sure he'd roll down the cliff, but he was able to save that awful scenario with the half inch of space left between the front bumper and cliff face.

"What are you doing?" Sam asked, breathless because he too was momentarily frightened of crashing into the chilly Atlantic Ocean and coming face-to-face with a blue whale.

"We're going to Arrowsic Island, are we not?"

Sam twisted himself around to look out the back left window of the car, to stare dumbfounded at the waves crashing against the rocky beach hidden from his vision. "Uh-huh."

"And Arrowsic Island is this way. I remember because they mentioned directions on the _Unsolved Mysteries_ segment… and the sign on the highway some miles back asking us to buy Arrowsic Island pottery, the one complete with a little map in the corner."

The younger Winchester brother settled back into his seat, half listening to the radio in case more important information about the case would pop up. "I can't believe my brother is an _Unsolved Mysteries_ buff."

"I am not a buff," Dean protested, loath to admit that he was actually, deep down, still a freak for the show. "I just didn't have anything else to watch at the time. You know, every now and then they show some relevant information."

"Oh, really?" Sam tried not to snort.

Dean motioned toward the radio with his right elbow. "They were doing the show on ghosts. They were talking about Arrowsic Island and how some of the people there still think Mad Doctor Meyers is still running around there, though he died in the 1950s. See, he and his wife – a nurse – moved to Arrowsic to pursue their medical dream. Turns out that dream was to perform surgeries on young people for whatever reason I can't remember. The townsfolk say that Dr. Meyers still operates on people from the grave. Everything else I can recall I've already explained. But I know there's more…."

"Like Dean Winchester's more of a nerd than his little brother is."

"Sammy, don't you think for a moment that I won't shove you out of this car."


	3. Three

**Chapter Three ; Tell Me How My Heart Tastes**

Bugs. Dean hated bugs – no, _loathed_ them with every fiber of his being – ever since he and Sam ran into that Realtor who thought it would be a good idea to build an expensive suburb on cursed Indian land. Ha! What a good idea that was, putting his entire family at risk to be slaughtered before sunrise by a million bugs. A million, creepy-crawly bugs that find ways into every crevice, every pore and–

Dean shuddered as he slammed his fist down on a spider walking along the trunk of his car. He shot a satisfied smile at the remains of the little arachnid, but when he realized he had spider guts on his hand he made a weird jerking-"eww"ing-hopping dance away from the car. Wiping his hand off on his pants – then groaning because he had now transferred spider goo onto his favorite pair of faded, holes at the knees, "Damn, Marcia, that man has a fine ass" jeans – he gave his day up as a bad job and went back to filling the Impala's gas tank.

The pit stop off the highway, at a gas station the brothers had never heard of before, was made primarily because Sammy had needed to visit the little boy's room. Dean was neither a barbarian nor a man to experiment what urine would do to superb leather upholstery, so he had pulled over to this unpopular (and high priced) establishment sitting under a seasonably grey sky.

With a longing glance at the convenience store part of the gas station, Dean sighed. "What did he do now, fall into the toilet?" Squeezing as many final drops of gasoline into the tank as he could, Dean flipped the license plate back to its proper position and returned the gas nozzle to the pump. "Well, I'm not fishing him out."

It didn't take long to enter the store, hear the sleigh bells jingling above his head. Pulling his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans ("A real fine ass, Marcia, _real_ fine"), Dean walked to the front counter and quickly scanned the building for a sign of his brother – the tall kid with nappy hair standing by the bulletin board, drooling over a lost puppy flyer.

"Pump number three," Dean stated gruffly as he turned around to face the cashier. When he saw the attending, he smiled and leaned into the counter. "Hey, there."

The platinum punk blonde (streaked with multiple colors, that fact Dean choosing to ignore) behind the cash register smiled back and shook her head. She had the word love tattooed across her throat, but other than that…. "Twenty-eight dollars, please."

Dean gave her extra. "Keep the change," he replied smoothly.

She slid the change in form of three dollar bills back across the counter. "Maybe if you had a more ecologically friendly vehicle."

Sam, still staring stupidly at that lost animal poster or whatever it really was, found it in him to laugh.

Making a mental note to throttle his brother the moment they left the building, Dean kept at it. "Oh, you say that _now_, but the moment you sit down in that car and feel those 390 horses vibrate under your feet…. " He smiled handsomely for good measure.

The woman – Stephanie according to her name tag – scoffed. "Those cars get abysmal gas mileage, absolutely horrible. Something like ten miles to a gallon. It's idiots like you, having to stop at gas stations three times a week, who are using up all our nonrenewable fossil fuels. You make me sick," she said slowly like she thought Dean horrendously dumb, lips curled back in a very unattractive sneer.

Dean narrowed his eyes and snatched up his money. "It's idiots like you, speaking ill of goddesses like that one sitting outside, who ruin my day. I hope you get robbed and the gunman rips that tattoo off your neck. 'Love'," he snorted. "Yeah, right. I hope you're aware that nonconformity is only conforming to nonconformity, Miss I Have a Rainbow for Hair." Sure he looked dumber than a freezer burnt rabbit, but Dean did have his moments.

"Have a very bad day, sir," Stephanie said, full of fake and irritating cheer.

It might be important to mention that Dean always destroyed those aforementioned moments, without fail.

Not bothering to fiddle with his wallet, simply shoving the three dollars in his right hip pocket, Dean huffed and began walking toward his brother. "Find a new job, hey? I hear PETA's looking for a few more research building arsonists. You'd look sexy with a Molotov cocktail in your hands, you really would – tell them Dean sent you and maybe someone'll throw one at that pretty little face of yours."

Stephanie didn't respond to that, merely slammed the cash register drawer shut and turned back to her People magazine. That's was fine by Dean; he would never be caught dead with anyone who couldn't respect the classic automobile, no matter how much they confused their face with a pin cushion.

At the bulletin board, Sam was grinning. "You really wooed her, Clark Gable."

Dean pulled at the lapels of his worn and weary brown leather jacket, trying to salvage a couple of cool points. He was scowling and, despite the fact that deep ruts would form several years faster in his forehead if he didn't stop, at the moment he didn't exactly care.

Sam pulled several wrinkled sheets of paper down from the cork board. "Clark Gable. He was a movie actor back in the golden era of motion pictures. You know: Aubrey Hepburn, Grace Kelley, Bella Lugosi."

"I know who Clark Gable is," Dean replied stiffly.

"Wrong tense. Now, you stay here and lower your blood pressure while I ask a few questions," Sam put lightly and handed Dean the aged flyers he had taken.

His blood pressure was _fine_, but any reason to stay away from that rude wench was a good one.

With a head roll, Dean looked down at the notices in his hand. They weren't missing persons reports, of course, because the victims of whatever it was they were now hunting were always found, but warnings rather. Requests for information regarding suspicious characters, a blown up newspaper article with main headline reading _"What's Happening to Our Children?"_, and a pink notice written by some Arrowsic parents about the murders. He only skimmed that last one, the pink was so vibrant and the text so black it made his eyes hurt.

While Dean's self-stated beautifuly hazel eyes were watering from the hot pink notice, Sam was standing at the counter tapping a ninety-nine cent lighter against the glass of the bakery display. He was hoping his stupid brother hadn't done a horrible amount of damage.

"We're going to visit our Uncle over in Georgetown," Sam started simply. "Those papers are kind of worrying me, though. They haven't found who's doing this yet?"

Stephanie was so engrossed in her Kenny Chesney article she didn't look up. "Between you and me I think they've plain stopped looking. I mean, when this first started happening after the few year break you couldn't walk two feet without running into a cop here, but now hardly any police come by for a fill. That lets you know other counties have stopped getting involved."

Few year break? "But surely they have a suspect by now."

So long Kenny, hello Jessica Simpson's roots in desperate need of touching up. "You'd think that, but they don't. There hasn't been one lead, not one, since this whole thing began. At least that's what my grandfather says; he was a kid when people first started getting killed, you see, and was around my dad's age when the hiatus started up. Everyone's given up finding answers if you ask me."

"What's this break you keep mentioning?"

Stephanie was a skimmer, she now started flipping through the magazine for something more interesting than an unscheduled dye job. "Well, according to the stories whoever's doing this for one reason or another went away for a while. The hiatus lasted a couple years, two to three, and then people started getting killed again – but the pace has been picking up lately. So unless you think this guy could be like the Zodiac Killer, you're like my brother-in-law."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, there are a few people out there who think the Zodiac Killer's back after a break, right? But that's mainly from those whacky tabloids. Say he did come back, that would make him pretty old for a serial killer, right? He's probably riddled with arthritis. But my kid brother-in-law runs with the crack-pots. Aliens, he says. Aliens murdering us through our dreams, he says."

Sam smirked, twirling the cheap lighter across his knuckles (or at least trying to, and badly). "What side of the fence are you on?"

"Neither. I think it's just some misguided kid, bunch of copycats, trying to be cool – like those dumbasses who drive around in gas guzzling, ozone destroying emission, Cracker Jack cars."

"I heard that," Dean shouted sourly.

"Good for you, sweetcakes, I hope you didn't hurt yourself," Stephanie called back. "Look," she added to Sam, "either pay for that or put it back. If you break that glass case I'll have your ass on a plate."

&&&

George Thorogood was telling a nice dog to move it on over because a mean ol' dog was moving in. Something about his lady locking him out of the house about a half past ten so now he has to sleep with the dog, some story like that. Sam would've failed a quizzing by this radio station's DJ because he wasn't paying the least bit of attention.

Dean wouldn't stop tapping his fingers along to the song, however, and if he hadn't been talking with Sam about the case at hand the youngest of the Winchester boys would have certainly chopped those fingers right off.

"I don't see any commonalities," Sam admitted. "Maybe when we arrive at Arrowsic and start poking around I'll be able to connect the dots, but so far these papers aren't the least bit of help. Soccer players, Debate team members, goths, respectable kids working in Georgetown, the list goes on and on. At least with our exorcism we had shared traits, weakness, but here…. "

"It's early yet, Sammy. You're always trying to figure everything out before hand and you know it doesn't always work that way," Dean stated before going back to humming the chorus of the song.

"_Sam_," he corrected harshly. "And why are you telling me this? Both of us run around like chickens with our heads cut off collecting information before the confrontations."

Dean turned the car right, cruised slowly down a pine needle dusted road. "I'm just saying. It looks a lot to me like you're really hoping for something to pop out at you from those sheets of paper. Something the matter?"

"No." Sam turned back to the flaming pink notice.

Dean all but stopped as they closed in on a narrow bridge. "You said that awful fast."

"So? Nothing's wrong. Why do you have to get on my back?" The notice didn't help him any, back to the newspaper article.

"Don't rip the pages there, Sammy, that's all the information we have on this so far."

"I'm not incompetent, Dean."

A turn left as directed by a handy, rustic wooden sign. "I know you're not, Sammy. I never said you were."

"It's Sam!"

"As long as you're my little brother, the hell you are."

Guitar solo time, and how fitting. A white boy from Maine playing blues guitar as the Winchesters were about to dive head first into the unknown evil plaguing a small island in said state. Where were the Destroyers when you needed them? Smack the evil to pulp with their guitars and drum sticks.

Though it wasn't the reason for their silence, Sam and Dean remained quiet throughout George's guitar solo – almost as if by an unspoken rule neither of them were to interrupt a genius at work. But when the singing resumed and Dean was quite sure his brother wasn't going to be the one to break the silence, he took it upon himself.

"I know you're uneasy about this. I have a bad feeling about it, too."

Sam was one step below sounding utterly offended. "I'm not uneasy. I don't have a bad feeling."

"What kind of being would want to hurt young people, teens and twentysomethings, by driving picks into their brains? Certainly not Oprah Winfrey, I'll tell you that. Maybe give them gold encrusted ice picks, but she'd never shove it into their head – that's just not Lady O. Something really bad, naturally, and that gives me the willies, too."

"I do _not_ have the willies."

Dean nodded, signaling his agreeing to disagree. "Whether you do or you don't, Sammy, we're here."

And here they were indeed.

The Impala was purring beside the township welcome sign, a cheery nautical design not giving the traveler the slightest inkling of the monster looming just inside the darkness. Beyond that, down the road, period housing and boats bobbing in the tide.

There wasn't much of anything else to see, and Dean had the horrible feeling that he'd be going in and out of the nearest town every time he needed something – like a bed to sleep in and a business anxious to serve him food. But in spite of those looming problems this place went beyond quaint to the point where it might have been sickening, "might have" only because Dean had seen pictures of Arrowsic Island before on the _Unsolved Mysteries_ segment and knew what he was up against. Sammy, on the other hand, felt as though he had been struck in the back of the head with a log named Home.

The younger-but-never-looked-so Winchester boy really was overcome with the sensation of finding home, though he couldn't explain why. He had always thought his home to be somewhere in the middle of a barley field, not surrounded by water with a lighthouse that would make any photographer squeal. Space, too. The home he had imagined in his head had lots of space, stretching room, but on this island which was less than nine square miles that was only a dream. Actually, it was still doable here as long as Sam sewed his arms to his side.

"How do people on an island this small not know what's happening?"

"Better question, Dean: how can they possibly get away? They have nowhere to run to."


	4. Four

**Chapter Four ; A Pile of Stones for Your Glass House**

If it meant anything at all to the strength (or sheer stupidity) of the town, the children weren't being locked away in their homes. Though it was a brisk autumn day even for Maine, kids were fishing with their makeshift fishing rods, tossing around the old pig skin, or playing a lively game of hide-and-seek by the lighthouse – poor Dean nearly ran over a little boy as he settled the car into a parking space.

Doubling Point Lighthouse, not at the number one spot on Dean's sightseeing list but, its grounds were open to the public. The lighthouse itself and the keeper's house were off limits, however, a reasoning Dean couldn't wrap his head around because how did the island expect to make any money if no one's allowed to look _inside_ their deathly boring lighthouse? But visitors could walk around the buildings and, if they were the sort, observe the town and wax poetic about kicking a specter's ass back to the underworld (with a lovely parting gift, of course, like the loser contestants get on _The Price Is Right_ when they get to come on down but never get to come all the way down to the stage with Bob).

Dean wanted to stay in the car where there was blessed heat, but Sam being Sam had stumbled out of the car quicker than a Jack Rabbit on a date. So here Dean was, face freezing off in the breeze from the river, walking beside his brother like some freak loner with a painfully strong fear of being alone. That, sadly, _was _Dean but he wouldn't ever admit to it… unless, maybe, some sicko threatened to scar up his beautiful face.

"If this place was anymore peaceful I'd be in a coma," Dean hissed, raising his shoulders so that the collar of his jacket might protect his ears. It didn't work, they were still icing over.

Sam was surveying the houses scattered about the front side of the island, marveled at how calm everything looked. If it hadn't been for radio announcements and newspaper articles he would've thought the killings were all a rouse. Surely nothing bad could ever happen in a place this beautifully passive to the world.

"How can anyone live like this?" Dean sniffed, nose beginning to run from the cold weather (or at least the cold weather _he_ was feeling, for Sam was perfectly comfortable). "It's so cold here, so isolated! There's absolutely nothing to do. Jesus, even watching the grass grow is too fast-paced for this place."

Not a single curtain was drawn, no shutters fastened. For all the murders the people on this island still lived, continued on with their day-to-day lives. Fascinating.

"No wonder there's a big pottery market here, it's the only thing that keeps these people from hanging themselves from the boredom!"

"I don't know, Dean, I kind of like it here. Besides, it's not isolated at all – the nearest town you can throw a rock at." Sam took a deep breath in. "Smell the air, it's so pure. Your big, fancy, happening cities don't have that."

"I would," Dean started cynically, "but I'm quite fond of my lungs unfrozen, thank you."

Sam sighed. "You're impossible. Why did you even keep on this line of work if you hate small towns so much? Small towns seem to be the epicenter of the supernatural, you know that."

"There are, like, ten people here, dude. This isn't a small town – I can deal with those just fine. This, my dear brother, is a rest stop for snails trying to break out into Canada."

"You might want to make friends with the snails then, buddy, because we might be here for a while."

Dean scowled, pressed a rock down into the dirt with his left boot heel. "Don't say things like that, Sammy, it's cruel."

He must have given up on trying to pound his preferred name into Dean's head. Sammy turned around to face his brother, pointed in the general direction of a small splattering of houses. "Tell me what this place is screaming at you."

"You mean other than 'This way to the psychotic break of your dreams?'"

Sam could look very freaky when he wanted to, when he narrowed his eyes to the perfect intense gaze that only he could muster. "Enough with the joking, Dean. Just tell me what you see."

Reluctantly Dean turned in the direction Sam had indicated, shrugged his shoulders. "A quiet, welcoming island village. I don't know, Sammy, it looks just like every other picture of a sea town I've ever seen."

The tall brunette showed his concurrence by nodding. "That's what I saw, too."

Raising his eyebrows, Dean waved his hands as he waited for an explanation that never came forth. "You know, Sammy, I don't live in your head, and thank Heaven for that. So if you could just spell out your thoughts a little for me…."

Sometimes Dean was convinced that his little brother loved to hear himself talk. This was one such moment. "This town has been subject to strange killings for decades, but the citizens here still buck up and leave their doors unlocked, their blinds open, the curtains tied back, and let their kids play outside. Most places would do the complete opposite, outfit their homes better than Fort Knox and hide their family members in bunkers. Why aren't the people here doing that?"

"I suppose you're not going to let me answer that," Dean replied smugly.

Sam started pacing, maybe because he was cold or maybe for added emphasis to his words. "I think because they have something to hide. Something horrible might have happened here a long time ago, something the people here don't want anyone else to know about, something involving your mad doctor."

Dean smiled. "See, I told you _Unsolved Mysteries _has some good information now and again."

"Yeah, but how much of it is true and how much didn't they tell? This could be like those fruity magazines in the check-out lanes; _A Tribe of Glowing People Found in Africa!_, _Aliens Stole My Husband's Skin, Giant Dinosaur Bats in Sky Terrorize Plane Passengers!_ For all we know we're dealing with something entirely different than an unstable surgeon. Maybe a very pissed off Carrietta White," Sam offered.

"Giant Dino bats?"

"Something like that, I didn't stop to read about it."

Dean snickered. "It could happen, though. For all we know next week we'll be back in a plane throwing fireballs at 'em. That would be cool, actually. We should make a dinosaur bat out of paper mache just to watch it go poof. I'll even let you throw the first raging ball of flame."

Fire was the last thing Sam Winchester ever wanted to talk about. "You're straying away from the main topic, Dean. We need to figure out where we're going to start with this case."

Dean was starting to shiver, the breeze drying out his eyes. "We can figure that out in the car, with the heat on full blast."

"Yeah, and get the IDs we're going to need. I'm thinking reporters again, give us access to files without much question," Sam explained as he walked with Dean back to the car. "We'll be spending a lot of time in town hall, in the library, and on an island this small we can't just walk up to someone and start asking questions."

"Take away all my fun, why don't you. Getting arrested for harassment is what I look forward to during our hunts."

Sam was the first one on the blacktop. His shoes slipped a little from the dew the rubber tennis shoe soles collected on the grass, but he was able to save himself from an embarrassing fall. "That's right, I forgot. I'm sure you'll love sitting in whatever tiny jail this island's set up. You can arrange plays for all your snail friends, teach them tap dance."

"Hardy Har Har," Dean sneered. He stopped midway through his stride, careful not to collide with the boy he nearly ran over some time ago. The kid must have been a quick change artist because he was wearing a different pair of pants, but then again maybe this boy was only a look-a-like. Either way, he streaked by Dean laughing and the adult watched the not quite ten-year-old run over to a small circle of girls.

Grinning, thinking the kid was a player in training which then started up a ride down memory lane, Dean forgot all about his intention of going into the heated Impala to melt his frozen gonads. He was only slightly disappointed when the boy he was so focused on ran right around the group of little ladies and to the trees, apparently to confront a giggling brunette boy hiding behind one of them. Or maybe the other boy was a blonde, Dean didn't care to check because by now he was no longer interested in the young lad in the blue windbreaker.

Sam, too, had stopped progressing toward the car and stood in the middle of the parking lot, as (if not more) obsessed with the circle of laughing girls than Dean was. That was an awkward observation, two grown men completely enthralled with a handful of little girls, but believe you me it wasn't at all sparked because they were kids or female.

The group of little women were jumping rope – or, rather, one was jumping rope, two were holding onto either end of a double rope, and the rest were enjoying their watching of the one girl maneuver between the multiple ropes. Anyhow, they were singing and that's what so captured Sam and Dean's attention. In fact, they were so enslaved to the chant that they each had to make a conscious effort just to move. Move away from the girls and to the car, all the while with their heads turned away but still listening.

The jumping rhyme was crude, something that any well-to-do or remotely caring parent would cart their child off to a therapist and CT scanners just for singing. But what luck that these kids didn't listen to the manners their parents taught them ("It's not very nice at all to sign vile songs in public"), that they were singing it _now_. Not yesterday, not tomorrow, not three minutes before Dean parked the Impala or while he was turning into a human Popsicle by the lighthouse, but now.

"Mad Doctor Meyers whips out his pliers, and 1 2 3 out come your eyes–" they said it much like eyers "–But first he strapped you down, far beneath this town, and 4 5 6 drew you up-like-a clown. He wants to eat your brain, stew it up with sugar cane, and 7 8 9 he'll then slurp up your vein. He'll poke around your skull, just like dear ol' Guhl, and 1 2 3 make a home for his sea-e gull. His wife is crazy too, together the coop they flew, and 4 5 6 snatch you from your bed – _who knew_? And now the end is near, as the moon it hits the pier, and 7 8 9 you scream for no one to hear."

They were giggling like the song was nothing more than a joke their teenage siblings told them, like there really wasn't an insane doctor waiting in the shadows to strap them down, far beneath this town, and poke around their skulls. Hell, maybe they were very much aware of that fact and were sending him an open invitation.

"Sometimes I think the Victorians were right," Sam muttered, "when they said children should be seen and not heard. Who knows what they're releasing with that."

Dean shut his door, no longer needing to hear what the girls were singing about. He pulled a black duffel bag from the back seat and began rummaging through it, in search of his monumental stash of fake IDs. "Nothing probably. I mean, the children here were most likely singing that schoolyard rhyme forever. If this guy comes around for the sole reason that the song's being sung, wouldn't he have popped up during his vacation?"

"Unless for three years the children were barred inside their homes, went without a single chance to sing it," Sam thought aloud.

"That's highly unlikely," Dean retorted. "Evil doesn't show up because of a song, it shows up when and where and how it wants to." He pulled out a Ziplock baggy stuffed to the gills with phony IDs. "Here we are. Reporters, right? College, _New York Times_, small town newspaper?"

Sam looked away from the playing children and to his brother. "_The New York Times_? How'd you manage something like that?"

"See these hands, Sammy?" Dean held his hands out, waved them in the air in a silly magical way. "I have the Gift."

"The Gift?"

"The Gift."

"Yeah, I guess you do. No one can be nearly killed by a vending machine quite like you can."

Dean harrumphed. "Hey, it stole my money! I wasn't about to let it keep the potato skins I paid for."

Laughing, Sam took the ID his brother handed him. "Dean, you got yourself wedged in the machine, they practically had to amputate your arm to free you. It wasn't at all a pretty sight."

"I showed that damn vending machine who was boss and you know it. Admit it, you were jealous of me."

"Jealous of you? You, the guy lying on the floor with his right arm jammed up a vending machine. Oh, yeah, I was green with envy all right."

"Whatever, Sammy. Let's just get to work, shall we? Where do you want to start?"

"Until you start calling me Sam, I'll no longer be answering to that name," he said priggishly. Getting the stolen bulletin board papers from the glove box, Sam scanned through the list of signed names on the violently pink parental notice. He read off the first name. "Gweneth Weiss. Seems as good a place to start as any."


	5. Five

Let's play a game, shall we? It's called Spot the Star and if you win… well, I can't give you a really cool prize. But the self-righteousness you get from winning will be better than anything I can serve up, eh? Yes, I'm cheap.

**Chapter Five ; Guilt, Go Ahead and Eat Me Up Inside**

A warm place, when you got right down to it that was all Sam had ever wanted. Jessica had been his warm place, the beating heart he had been searching for all his life, but that was all robbed from him now. He no longer had that heart, the one he listened to underneath his ear all of those nights to lull him to sleep, and he no longer had a warm place.

Adrift at sea, that's how Sam felt all the time now. Drifting, drifting, holding onto the desperate hope that made up his raft; the desperate hope that eventually he'll see land… but land never comes, only more water and more water after that. There's fire, too, starting up out of nowhere and replacing the moon and the stars. Fire above him, black cold water below him, suffocating for no reason other than the fact that he doesn't seem to want to breathe. If he doesn't breathe, then maybe he can find his warm place again. And it almost happens, him rejoining that warm place, but then he'll breathe.

Then he'll breathe and he'll hear Jessica talking to him. He can't exactly hear her, but he knows she's there and he can understand what she's saying all too well. Sam doesn't love her anymore, she'll say, he doesn't want to be with her like he once told her he wanted to be. In his defense he'll start screaming at her, yell and pound his fists and tell her that he never meant to breathe. He loves her, he wants to be with her so much it hurts, but every time he's on the threshold and is about to take her hand his brother has to yank on his diaphragm and make him inhale.

Here Dean was, doing it again. Like a cockroach that just wouldn't die, Dean was always there. Maybe Sam was thankful for that, but maybe he wished that his brother would go away for a while and let Sam be. Of course, that would never happen.

So there Sam stood, holding his breath as he stared at a white door with slightly peeling paint, and knowing full well that at any moment Dean was going to clap him on the back. When that happened, Sam would be ready to rip that pretty boy's arm off and shove it down his throat.

"You worry me, Sammy" were the words that replaced a slap on the back. Apparently Dean was a mind reader and even if he wasn't, if he just didn't want to pound on his brother's back in a public place and get arrested for abuse, it worked just as well.

As the front door to the Weiss home opened, Sam took a rather explosive breath in. His vision pixelated for several moments, but he was still able to make out a white haired woman of average height, average build, with few wrinkles and a loud flower blouse that clashed horribly with her skin tone.

"Ma'am," Dean nodded. "This is Sam Krueger and I'm Dean Baker. We're with _The New York Times_ and if it's all right, we'd like to ask you a few questions for the piece we're working on."

Gweneth's foundation title: Apprehension. "Shouldn't you boys be over talking to Matthew and Julia Sanders? Most other journalists have congregated around them like flies to a corpse."

Sam's head was no longer thought itself a balloon that wanted to sail away. "That's a very interesting picture, Ma'am, but actually we'd like to give them a little time to grieve before we go ringing their doorbell. They only lost their son this morning."

After a pause, one in which she didn't lose a speck of her startchy tone, Gweneth eyed the brothers carefully. "What do you want to know so badly that you come here all the way from New York?"

"Anything you can tell us, that's what we'd like to know," Dean put point blank.

Gweneth Weiss didn't seem too happy with that statement, but she must have figured that Sam and Dean wouldn't be getting off her porch anytime soon because eventually she moved aside and let them through the door. "I was just making some tea," she offered – or did she? Her tone was so dry it was hard to tell if she was simply stating a fact or putting fuel in her hospitality float.

Both the brothers nodded and threw out various forms of "Thank you, Ma'am".

"Please, call me Gweneth. As long as you're in my house you might as well call me by my name," she explained as she disappeared through an archway. "Make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen."

Though the house was a two-story, the square footage went straight up. When Sam closed the front door it didn't take any effort at all to walk into the living room, four of five feet at the most. He sat down next to Dean on a period sofa under a north facing window and, for no other purpose than to look professional, took a notebook and pen from his coat pocket. "I hope we're not keeping you from anything," he said politely.

"Oh, no, not at all," Gweneth could have cooed from the kitchen. There was another archway that connected the small cook station to the living room, so the boys could see and hear her easily from their posts. "Now that Earl's gone away on business I spend my days knitting or at Church, visiting with the grandchildren."

"Were any of yours part of the group we saw down by the lighthouse?" Sam asked, staring down at the notepad in his hands with an _"I'm so excited to be taking notes again"_ expression on his face. To Dean's horror, his brother wasn't being sarcastic.

"Goodness, no," the elder laughed and came out of the kitchen with a platter in her hands. She set it down on the coffee table in front of the sofa and poured three cups full of drink with a tea pot, all of which had been carried on the serving platter. Taking one of the Robin's egg blue cups in her hands, Gweneth settled down into a high backed chair to Sam's left. "Stephanie's in her late twenties and Craig's not far behind. They're a little too old for hopscotch and hide-and-seek, though they are fond of squabbling like children about her hair. Poor thing, Craig says it's liable to fall right out if she keeps on dying it the way she does. You know," she chuckled, "it was green the last time I saw it. Looked like a lime vomited all over her head, but don't you tell her I said that."

Dean's face had surely turned as green as lime sick knowing that his convenience store clerk lady friend was this woman's granddaughter. Sam, on the other hand, smiled and shook his head.

"No, of course we won't," he replied softly. In truth he had been hoping to speak with Stephanie again about what she knew about the case, but how was he going to do that if she was told he was visiting an uncle he didn't have in Georgetown and had now shown up at the doorstep of her grandmother's? Oh well, maybe he wouldn't need to speak to her again.

Trying to get the sour taste from his mouth, Dean snatched up a tea cup and took a sip that burnt off the first three layers of his tongue. He frowned and set it back on the coffee table. "Can you tell us anything about what's going on, Ma' – Gweneth? It seems like no one really knows anything, not the reporters, not anyone."

"No one knows where to start, I suppose. This is a very small island, as you can tell, and when strange things begin to happen it's hard to make sense of them."

"Strange?" Sam repeated. "How?"

Gweneth seemed totally calm, like this conversation was about the proper way to cook a lobster instead of mysterious deaths. "On an island with little over 470 people, there's bound to be some type of clue somewhere, a lead, or someone who was told something. There's none of that kind of thing here, never has been. Not even a single drop of blood anywhere on this island."

Sam, though he didn't need to take them, jotted down notes anyway because that's what reporters do. "Dean and I, we heard a… song, if you could call it that. I don't know if you've heard of it, but the children said–"

"'You scream for no one to hear'?" Gweneth finished like she had just recited a line from a _Fraggle Rock_ episode. "Yes, I've heard it before. In fact, I used to sing it when I was a little girl. It's true, however, that no one has heard so much as a pin drop during the murders. One child slept in the same room as another one that died, didn't even hear the sheets rustle."

"But how can that be? How can no one hear anything? The killings, they're so grisly…. You say you've sung the rhyme when you were younger, so you mean to say that these slayings have been occurring for that many years?" Dean asked, honestly not meaning to sound insulting.

Nodding, Gweneth took a drink of her tea. "We were just as clueless back then as well."

"Shouldn't that mean you at least have a suspect, _theories_?" Sam prodded.

"Of course we do, have theories. They run the whole gamut, but that doesn't mean it's gotten us anywhere."

Sam tapped the tip of his pencil against his notepad. "One of them, I assume, has to do with this Doctor Meyers in the song you used to sing. He was mad, at least they say?"

Gweneth, like she always did when she wasn't sipping on her drink, set the cup down smoothly in her lap. "Gentlemen, Doctor Meyers isn't a real person. He's in the song as something to rhyme pliers with. Neither is old man Guhl while we're on the topic."

"But I've heard of several articles mentioning a Doctor Meyers and this island," Dean tried to egg the old woman on.

"People make blockbuster movies about false legends and the fabricated people who die in the woods whilst pursuing said legend," Gweneth expounded simply. "I don't see why a television show set on the mystery buff part of the population wouldn't make something up about this island either."

Dean's tongue was still stinging and it hurt even more when he had to admit his brother was right…_ again_. Dammit. "They mentioned something about a Doctor Meyers coming to this island with his wife, performing surgeries on the residents here much the same way as the children here are being killed. That's a pretty risky thing to make up."

"You reporters do it all the time," Gweneth replied, her voice lifeless as sandpaper once again. "It's not unheard of to fabricate something in order to bring your television show, your newspaper back from the brink. It puts that town under a spotlight we don't want or need, but as long as you get a boost in your ratings it's a-okay."

Sam knew that if he showed his frustration the whole island would hear about this episode in more detail than they ever needed to know. Every door would be locked to them if they weren't careful about how they acted. "I'm sorry if we're upsetting you, that wasn't our intent. Sometimes we believe too much in what we read."

Dean was ready to protest, but found the toes of his left foot being crushed under his brother's heel. It wasn't pleasant at all and shut him right up. Let's see: he had spider guts on his pants, a burnt tongue, this woman was related to that gas station bitch, and now his toes were broken. Well, his day just kept getting better and better!

"That's all right," Gweneth seemed to lie, but for the moment she wasn't kicking the boys out of her house.

Trying to approach his question as painlessly as he could, Sam stopped hurting his brother to lean forward in his seat. "I've read a notice that you and some other residents have written. Do you feel as though it's helped at all?"

"People are still dying, Sam. It hasn't helped in the least, but what else were we to do?"

The last thing he and Dean needed was a sign stapled to their foreheads, but in order to get any information that was a chance Sam was simply going to have to take. "Gweneth, I'd like for you to tell me what happened to your mother. You mentioned her in that notice and I'd like to know if you saw or heard anything that you think you might not have."

It had been a short acknowledgment, not even two sentences, but it stood out like a sore thumb. Gweneth Weiss's mother, as far as Sam knew to date, had been the only victim that had been married with children. She had been the oldest too, in her forties, when she died. It went completely against the grain of all the other killings, something had to be special about it – if it had even been a supernatural murder at all.

"There isn't anything I can tell you. I left to go to a friend's birthday party that night, said good-bye to my mother. When I left she had just been settling down to take a nap on the couch, when I came back I found her dead in that same spot. My father had been at work, what siblings of mine still lived at home off at school activities or football practice. No one was there when it happened."

And, of course – as the Dresden Dolls once sang – it is a lie. Sam knew because Gweneth was looking at her tea when she said that, just as she did when she was talking about the doctor who "didn't exist".

But she now was able to meet the brothers' eyes, looking quite angry in fact, and stood up. "I want you two to go now. You can walk yourselves to the door."


	6. Six

It was Matthew Sanders (aka M Shadows of Avenged Sevenfold). I figured no one would get that…. Anyway, I changed my mind about only the first chapter being in present tense. I'm sure it's confusing for you, this switching all over the place, but I find it adds a sense of panic and realism to the situation.

**Chapter Six ; The Trees Are Bleeding**

She doesn't know this man, but then again she does. It's one of those, "have you ever been at someplace, recognizing everybody's face until you realized that there was no one there you knew" kind of things ("Well, I _know_" the little person in the control room of her mind began singing, not aware of the fact that the time to sing Offspring songs should be saved for a less puzzling hour).

Trisha knows the guy's face, the guy's acne scarred face, but she really doesn't. This happened to her once before, when one of her girl's had talked so much about the boy she met at summer camp that by the time he visited, Trisha had already recognized his face without ever having seen a picture of him. That sensation's odd, for sure, and at this moment one she really hopes she won't ever have again.

Okay, she doesn't want to feel this way again and she knows/doesn't know this man sitting in front of her – but that doesn't answer the jackpot question: why the fuck is she here in this funky-nasty basement?

"Because you've been a very bad girl, Patricia."

Crap, this dude can read her thoughts.

She focuses her eyes to the man settled in the chair across from her, the only other soul in the basement. He matches the place like nothing else can possible hope to; a sleazy man to be paired with a goo covered basement with the pungent oder of… Trisha doesn't know. But it can't be anything good: roses don't weigh the air down, make it this stuffy and smell bad enough to form this nausea ball in her throat. Yeah, so back to the dude in front of her.

First impressions are nothing, at least that's what her friend Mary always likes to say. It's the last impressions you really ought to aim for, that's what she'll tell anyone with ears, because you never know if you're going to meet the person again. Don't try to be anything but yourself, Mary never stops to point out, don't try too hard by doing up your hair and buying a whole new outfit – that's a cardinal sin, she'll say while wagging her long, pale finger. _Last_ impressions, those are what you want to go with. That way, when you meet someone, they know right away who the hell you are and what you're all about.

Trisha never knows what Mary is always talking about – last impressions, wouldn't they be the same as first impressions? They're impressions, anyway, what the fuck kind of difference does it make? But as she stares down the forty, fifty-year-old calmly situated in the big, Old-Sparky-without-all-the-fixens chair a half dozen feet in front of her, Trisha's dead set on the fact that he must have gone to the same crack-pot mantra of a class as Mary had.

Her new playmate is horrendously short, has to scoot his butt all the way to the front edge of the chair seat in order for his feet to kind of, sort of touch the ground and even then – swing, swing. That alone makes Trisha want to laugh, but the look on his face makes her think better of it: Wentworth Miller on steroids. Now, he's not anywhere near Mr. Miller status on the Scale of Attractiveness (anyone who's anyone will agree with her, of that she's quite sure), but for the sake of argument this dude has such a stern face, an intense stare as to make poor Went blush and run back to New Jersey, go back to singing a capella with The Princeton Tigertones.

He has his hands folded in his lap, this new guy and not Went Miller (because if it was Wentworth Miller Trisha'd have him on the floor by now), real gentleman like and his posture is impeccable. But that doesn't mask his eyes, those scary intense eyes. They're black, too. Fucking hell, they're black – not _all_ black, that's just stupid, but the irises. The fact that he had just read Trisha's thoughts didn't soften them at all, and neither did those singing acne scars – he looks like a freaky burn victim, so not GQ.

This is kind of like a Stephen King novel come to life, what with the black eyes and the mind reading, and Trisha hates Stephen King novels. Shit, fuck, motherfucker, cunt, she isn't liking this so far.

"Miss Garland, I will not tolerate that kind of language, especially coming from a young lady such as yourself," Pot Hole Face puts sternly.

Trisha rolls her eyes, and her new stranger friend continues on like she really hadn't taken her bitch pills this morning. No, wait, it was last night.

Trisha can't remember ever waking up today, just yelling at her parents and slamming the door, putting the pillow over her head and falling asleep. What had they been fighting about, anyway? Christ, they fight so much it gets so hard to tell, everything just melds together into one ugly lump. Her boyfriend, at least she figures, because all the fights nowadays revolve around that twentysomething-year-old boyfriend of hers. Yeah, so Trisha isn't even seventeen yet, but Derek's a nice guy and her stupid, asshole parents don't want to acknowledge that.

All right, so she had slammed the door in her father's face last night and went to sleep. Sleep… here. Here… sleep. Why can't she remember anything between those two points? Trisha didn't just Apparate here like those witch kids in those books, that's crazy talk. She had to have been drugged, and this was all a toxin induced dream. That makes perfect sense, the being drugged scenario. So Trisha'll just chill out in this chair and ignore the bozo in front of her until the alarm clock goes off at the ass-crack of dawn.

"Like I've previously stated, you're here because you've been a very improper young woman. I don't know about you, dear Patricia, but I would like to do something about that," the stranger spouts on. For a mind reader, Acne Scars isn't too up on the fact that Trisha's more concerned about finding out who drugged her than what he has to say.

Preoccupied, wracking her brain trying to find out who was there in Christie-Ann's rumpus room that didn't like her enough to drug her, Trisha looks at her playmate without actually looking at him. "Fine, do what you want, but just don't look at me like that. Even in dreams, it's not fucking polite to stare."

But she didn't form the words correctly, wasn't able to, because she has this thing in her mouth, this _horse bit_. The hell? Of course, this is a dream and in dreams things appear out of nowhere.

Jesus, her night just keeps getting worse. As if living on this God forsaken island isn't bad enough, Trisha simply _has_ to wind up drugged and be going through this creepy, S&M confused, high of a dream. Not only that, this dream has to take place in a foul basement, she has to sit across from this crazy looking dude with a gag in her mouth, and have absolutely no recollection of even being drugged in the first place. Well, if this moment gets any worse she'll shoot herself. Yep, she'll dream up a revolver and empty a few rounds into her pretty dream head – that'll take care of this lousy night.

And maybe then this freak will stop staring at her. God, why doesn't he wash his scrubs every once and a while? They're rotting from the old blood, it's so disgusting. Better yet, why the hell doesn't he take a moment out of washing those offensive scrubs and learn how to blink? Shit, not blinking like that is more creepy than his sternness and intensity. _Great_, and now the pot hole face doctor is smiling.

"There's no need to be so angry, Miss Garland," the greasy, bloody, certifiably insane MD tells her. "I've done this many a time before."

_This_? What the fuck does "_this_" mean?

Trisha, being the rude and flaky chick that she is, makes to get up out of her chair and accomplish an ace diva-style stormy exit from the vile and slimy walled basement… but she's tied to it, the chair, another gift of her spiked cola.

Until this moment she never thought herself so dumb as to not notice being bound to a chair with a bit in her mouth, in the waking world or not. God, with her braces it's going to be a bloody miracle if the piece of horse equipment ever came out. But why's she freaking out about it, this is a dream…. But of course, since when do dreams give you a splinter in your index finger that stings and bleeds and feels all too real?

Dream or not, Trisha's never touching drugs again. Alcohol maybe, but definitely no more drugs if it means going through this again; this is so not her idea of a high. What are those druggies so elated about if _this_ is what a high is like?

"Don't worry," the psycho-chic doctor says to her like she'd never tuned him out to worry about a horse bit entwining with her braces, druggies and how they can actually like this kind of fucking thing. "This won't hurt you too badly."

And then, out of a dark corner of the room, a nurse walks into the picture, a really formidable one with her frizzy hair up in a bun. The nurse is holding something in her hands, something that most certainly should be in a tool shed and definately not in the presence of a doctor with an evil sheen to his eyes, an intensity that outdoes Wentworth Miller when that shouldn't even be possible.

There's a feeling creeping through her now, that black hole where your stomach once was kind of feeling that accompanies seeing the grin on a doctor's face when he looks at said blood stained wood working tool. It's a bad sign, a really bad sign, that pumps Trisha full of "fight or flight".

Flight, please. Flight, flight, flight. First class next to her little Wenty, right by the restroom so she can get a stamp on her Mile High Club card.

"Relax, Patricia," the giddy, maniac doctor tells her in a sing-song manner. "It's not as if you have the option of leaving. Bad young women can never go home."

Wake up, Trisha. Just wake up, Trisha. Come the fuck on, Trisha, this is all a dream and _you need to wake up_!

The doctor leans toward her, close enough for the smell of his decaying teeth to rape her senses. "No, Patricia. This isn't a dream, you can't wake up, because you are already awake."

Violently Trisha shakes her head, screams a high pitched series of "No!"s through her gag, and thrashes around so much that she actually moves the chair she's bound to a foot to the right. Dream or not, she wants out. She's always gotten what she's wanted and right now what she wants is to get the fuck out of this whore's pussy of a room.

There has to be a door around here somewhere, she wouldn't have gotten herself stuck down here like this if there wasn't one. But how is Trisha suppose to find that damn door and get herself through it if she's bound to a solid wood chair and she's being threatened by a guy taking a saw from his nurse's hands?

Who is this guy to treat her like this, anyway? Who the bloody hell is he to gag and bind her and hide her deep within some disgusting pit? She, Patricia Ann Garland, prom queen two times running, was _not_ suppose to be knocked around like this. She was not born to be trapped in a chair giving her splinters and fall down in it onto her side because she moved around too much.

The doctor, holding the old fashioned saw limp in his right hand, sighed. "Don't make this harder on yourself, Patricia. The more you squirm about, the more this is going to hurt you, and I don't think you want to jog my hand and have this saw slice your entire brain in half, do you?"

Trisha's crying, not because she's afraid (though she is, enough so to piss her pants) but, because she's angry someone could treat her this way. Save sawing at someone for the lunatics, the slime ball hicks in the Georgia hills, but not _her_. Patricia Garland is not – _is not_ – this bastard's toy.

"It's an attitude like that, Patricia, that makes your insides so black and ugly – here, allow me to show you."

Trisha's chair, being so old, isn't quite fit enough to handle a healthy sixteen-year-old's twisting and thrashing blows. As the doctor approaches her to let her see her guts, her left leg suddenly flies out further than she ever intended it to and kicks him in the knee. Sadly, it doesn't stop him at all – on the contrary, that kick seems to have made him more energized – and keeps on pursuing a frantic Trisha.

Smiling, caressing the wooden saw handle with his thumb, the mad doctor arrives beside Trisha and gazes down at her. "I've always been fond of the ones who are so desperate to get away that they only make things worse for themselves. What say you, Emily?"

Panicking though she is, Trisha is still far too conscious of the present situation. Her right shoulder's killing her, absolutely killing her, and she thinks she might have dislocated it from moving it around so much like she did. Hands rubbed raw against the wooden arms of the chair, bleeding and screaming out like wild beasts, black mold jumping from the floor to the right side of her face, and sheer terror aren't enough to move Trisha's mind away from the mad doctor and his nurse.

The nurse is foreign, German or Russian or something like that, which explains why she's built like a brick wall. With a head thinking it's a top, it's hard for Trisha to understand what the hell it is that the nurse is talking about – something involving a mutt and a bear trap.

"What do you say we make this one extra special?"

Those words are like a booming terror inside Trisha's head. She can't believe it, not at all, but this mad doctor with the horrific acne scars is actually thinking about making this moment even more frightening than it already is. She doesn't want to know what they're going to do to her, Trisha just doesn't want to know, and so she starts crying even harder now. Carried into her lungs by aid of her gasping breaths, are surely loads and loads of black mold and slime particles.

"Doktorr, vhat are you propozink?"

And he leans down over Trisha, swinging the saw playfully with one finger. "What do you say we make this one extra special?" he repeats. "This one, I'm afraid she's going to move around too much during the surgery and make it useless. Right. We'll see what makes this woman _tick_, see if we cannot help her that way."

She's still trying to get out of the binds, Trisha is, but she's doing it so pathetically, so weakly, and she's crying like a baby.

Still leaning before Trisha, the doctor nods. He raises his right arm and brings the saw down on the binds, one two three, each in a swift smack, slide kind of motion. But along with the binds comes Trisha's right foot, both her hands, and even the bit in her mouth can't stop the blood curdling scream that escapes her.

"There, now, you aren't thinking about getting away from me," the doctor states coldly as he stands up. "I wouldn't want you to leave me now, dear Patricia, not when you're so close to the healing stage. Let me help you, eh, Miss Garland? Well," he laughs, "I suppose asking you for your permission is an inane thing to do, because even if you say no…."

Yes, it is an insipid, silly, thing to do. Dear Patricia doesn't want any help, not that it matters if she voices that opinion, especially if help involves more mutilation. But she does want one thing, though: she wants to go home.

Bawling, bleeding profusely, screaming from the pain, Trisha falls onto her stomach. She looks nothing like the two-time prom queen she used to be, not with two hands and one foot missing and a face bloated from crying and a nose that's running in that way she's always made fun of when she sees people crying and in desperate need of a tissue in the movie theatre. Now she's one of those weeping freaks – too bad she's in too much pain to laugh at herself.

"Emily, love, if you could move her into a better position for me. Yes, I think that's best. Help her to roll onto her back – no use of putting her on the table if she can slip right out of the restraints – and maybe hold her down for me," the doctor orders.

Trisha doesn't understand why he's doing this, why he's so keen on chopping off her hands and sawing to her brain, but she's in no state to fight about it now. She'll give anything to be back home again, screaming at her parents about how stupid they are for telling her she can't date her boyfriend, and if it means no hands and only one foot….

Her brain's foggy by the time Nurse Emily comes to her, digs her nails into Trisha's left side and violently rolls her onto her back. The nurse is saying something to her, so's the doctor, but Trisha can't really hear. The words are all watered down, muddy, and she can't make any of them out. She guesses the nurse can't possibly be complaining about how much blood is getting onto her old fashioned uniform, not when it's so hopelessly stained already.

The doctor's standing before her, that little man with dead black eyes, but Trisha doesn't really see him. Shock is setting in, and she's wondering why she hasn't passed out from all the pain she feels yet. It happened in _Lost_, when that one Tailie gets his leg set without being anesthetized, he passes right out. Maybe she's in too much pain to pass out, is that possible? She figures, since it's not unheard of to be too tired to fall asleep.

She can't decipher what she sees anymore, her brain's slowed down so much. Her thoughts are all funny, too: she can't think straight. Trisha's staring up at the doctor, thrashing around in efforts to be free or maybe that's all in her head. She doesn't know, is just kind of wasting away there on the floor, is only vaguely aware of the doctor kneeling down to put his face too close to hers.

His lips are moving soundlessly around the time a pinching, stinging sensation comes from her chest. It doesn't hurt because nothing really hurts anymore. Trisha can still feel, just not hurt, not the kind of hurt that ran through her when her hands and foot were cut off. She likes that, likes this feeling of floating down a river on an inner tube. It's so peaceful, this feeling, and she wishes the blackness crawling around the edges of her vision will come closer to her, wrap her up like a blanket, like Derek's arms when he lies on the couch with her when there's nothing else to do but cuddle.

But in a brief, bright moment of clarity among the enclosing darkness, Trisha can feel all too well doctor's hand dive through her chest, to her heart and she screams like she never has before. The nurse, she can feel her too, feel her fingers dig deeper into her arms to hold her steady. Lastly and most frighteningly, before she finally falls into unconsciousness, Trisha can hear the doctor yelling at her, his voice making the slimy concrete walls shake.

"–_CAN NEVER GO HOME!_"


	7. Seven

I only mention the new episode which hasn't aired yet because this story – for reasons I'd rather not get into – takes place after it. You know, those teleplay writers are really starting to annoy me.

**Chapter Seven ; These Lonely Dreams Are Satisfying**

There's a saying people use on cerebral cop shows, the kind of cop shows Sam couldn't remember because it was so long ago that he watched any, but he remembered how a cop would roll his eyes and say "Let's get out of here before the dancing bears show up". The detective or police officer or whoever it happened to be will say that because the setting the script writers threw him into is swarming with people; journalists, television crews, trail junkies, hair and make-up people for all the reporters there craving for the first comment from the accused, absolutely swarming with people.

On an small island such as Arrowsic, resting beneath the grey autumn clouds about to burst forth with their present of freezing rain, even one journalist and her cameraman was tantamount to a three ring, hee haw of a circus. It didn't help, either, that she looked like one of those real scrappy journalists. Sam would have bet his head to the devil that this one, this short brunette in a dress jacket and matching skirt, had waited for hours on the Sanders's front steps for a chance to speak with them about their dead son. That sickened Sam, how there were people like that walking around.

But, then again, what was he doing? He wasn't sitting on the hood of the Impala with his brother just for the fun of being soaked to the bone once the drizzle turned into a steady rain. Sam was encroaching on the opportune moment of making a set of parents feel even more depressed and lost and empty than they already were. That sickened him even more than anything else, made him feel like some kind of depraved monster.

Beside him Dean sighed, rolled his shoulders and in effect knocking into Sam. The younger brother was in a daze, body for the most part completely limp, and had Sam not had his feet planted firmly on the ground he might have made a crash meeting with the pavement. He didn't mind that, rolling down the grassy hill and colliding with the asphalt, because maybe he deserved to have the skin on his face peeled off. What kind of person dug his fingers into the injuries of hurting people, ripped their wounds wider and deeper and then poured salt into those new bleeding craters? Certainly not a good one and, though his intentions were of the utmost good, doing what he did to people called for a serious case of road rash.

"Are we going to talk about this?" Dean asked meekly, rubbing something into the ground with the toe of his boot. "I mean, it's been how many weeks and we haven't said a word about it yet."

Sam turned his head to the left and found that his brother, the King of Charisma, didn't want to make eye contact with him. That was a first, his brother avoiding one of the first rules of conversation, and it was an uncomfortable feeling. It was silly, but Sam's stomach seemed to twist up and dip itself into a vat of anxiety. If Dean Winchester suddenly didn't want to look at someone when he was talking to them, surely the world was about to end.

In all honesty, and usually Sam was pretty considerate about these kinds of things, seeing his swoon machine of a brother like this was pathetic. He had never seen Dean like this – folded up into himself, hunched over with his hands on either side of him for bracing (something Dean would never do in his right mind, not when the oils on the human hand might do so much damage to car wax), and staring so hard at his shoes it looked like he was trying to shoot lasers out of his eyes – and it was scary.

All the years Sam had known him, Dean had never been the kind of man to show a whole lot of his feelings. If Dean had ever cried, Sam had never known about it and had always assumed that Dean was physically unable to shed tears or simply hid somewhere were he couldn't be intruded upon. If Dean had ever told someone that he loved them flat out, without witty remarks or enigmas or joking tones, Sam had never heard it. If Dean had ever once felt inadequate, insecure, or downright worthless, it had never shown – until now. And suddenly Sam wished that the old Dean was back, the hard nosed and bullheaded jerk who couldn't stop thinking about getting laid.

What did it mean for Sam if all of a sudden his brother had let down his defenses? Though he had let the world know on many occasions that he hated his brother, or at least hated his personality and void emotions, in reality Sam had always counted on that. Dean being Dean, the arrogant go-getter, had been the last stable and trustworthy thing in Sam's life and now that was gone, all gone….

Who was going to scream at him to breathe now, to come back into the world, to stop being such an ungrateful little pissface? Who was going to silently badger him about his nightmares if the old Dean was gone? Who was going to lay face down on the motel bed in his skivvies, act like he had been sleeping but let Sam in on the fact that Dean had really been watching his kid brother have bad dreams all night? Now who was going to hit on every last attractive waitress in every last eatery they went to?

The entire world was going to change now that Dean's walls had been breeched. The sun was going to die out, pitch the earth into everlasting blackness and evil and Sam was going to have to fight it all alone. He was going to lose everyone now, everyone, and there was no way he'd be able to handle that. His brother was going to become lost to him, just like his father, and he'd have to wander the streets by himself for the rest of his life. _Alone_.

On the verge of a full blown panic attack, Sam tried to stare the old Dean Winchester back into the waking world. His heart might have stopped beating, lungs might have finally shut themselves down forever, but all that really mattered was Sam not being thrown to the sharks with no one there with him. Dammit, he wasn't made to be abandoned, and if this is what Dean had felt like when Sam had run off to that Ivy League College of his then by God he should've fallen to the pavement and ripped his skin off after all.

Dean, rocking forward, sneezed – a probable effect of the cold evening or the drizzle – and locked onto his brother's eyes when he turned his head to the right. "Don't you hate when that happens, when you have to sneeze and you're sitting there for ten days before it actually comes?"

There was that unnamed feeling again, the one living deep within Sam's circulatory system that was far stronger than any kind of loathing ever created.

That filthy swagger was back, that jealously inducing smile, the damn shine in those hazel eyes. "What I mean to say, college boy," Dean went on as he placed his hands back onto either one his thighs, "is that you haven't said one word about what happened at _that_ house since we drove away from there."

"Should I have?" Sam asked through a clenched jaw.

"Well, seeing as how you were the one who dragged me down there, how you being the perfect sibling made Missouri treat me like a five-year-old, and how I had to save your ass _again_…," Dean shrugged. "Yeah, I think that might have been a very good idea."

Sam scoffed, looked back toward the Sanders home at the woman reporter still on their tiny front porch with the microphone shoved through the front door. "It's a two way street, dude, you could have talked first," he stated.

"Once, just once I'd like to get through a conversation without any snide remarks. Remember how you almost killed me back at that asylum? Looked like you were enjoying it, too, but the least you can do for that is not mock me."

"But it's so easy to mock you, Dean," Sam replied. "Half the time you don't even know it's happening."

Dean slid of the Impala's hood and shook his head, snorted something like an annoyed bull. "Just because you went to that fancy college of yours on a full ride doesn't mean I'm stupid. Hell, some of the most intelligent and successful people in the world never went to college, some even dropped out of high school!"

"Why are you so touchy about everything? You know most of what I say I never mean, it's not like my main goal in life is to drive you down – I have better things to do with my time."

"There you go again! Look, Sammy, I know I say a lot of things to you, but at least I'm decent enough to not do it all the fucking time."

"You're talking to me about decency?" Sam laughed. "Please, next to you Ted Bundy's a saint."

The eldest Winchester brother had not once in his entire life held the gift of speech. He had never been one to be able to come right out any say what he meant, not if it involved any kind of real emotion – the kind every single one of his girlfriends had scorned him for never showing. But it wasn't like he never felt them, he was simply missing the piece in him that helped him find the words to express love, sadness, anything other than anger and spite in a public setting. If he could hide behind a corner and speak into an answering machine, he was a poet, if he could write a letter to someone (thinking whoever it was he was writing to was a fictional character) the words flowed from his pen with a feverish fluidity.

But something like this was lost on him. Here Dean was, standing beside his kid brother with the perfect chance to let all the words out, the sentences and paragraphs that had been building up over time, but they were blocked. Too much mass for such a tiny hole, that's what it was like to him. So all he could do was stand there, his mouth open for his uvula to freeze, and hope that either he or his brother would be able to change the subject.

"_Dammit, Sammy, I'm your brother and I love you! How can you be so blind as to not see that?"_ The words echoed through Dean's skull cavern, but as always they never went anyplace else.

"If we wait around here any longer," Dean said with emotion too great for such a simple sentence, "it'll be too late to do anything."

Sam got to his feet. Just as he had always done it, he made sure his apology was laced somewhere in the tone of his reply. "Are you sure about this? Given the way Gweneth was acting, I wouldn't put it past these people to stay home tonight."

"We can't exactly switch to being police officers, can we? We'll just have to chance it, hope these parents are like any other grieving family and not want to sleep in the same house with their dead son's room just down the hall. For tonight, at least."

The Impala was parked lengthwise beside the east wall of an old, dilapidated barn on top of a small hill, at such an angle that no one from the street or on the river would be able to see it. Granted, their cover was a pretty moronic one, but Dean was loath to leave his baby left unattended in the parking lot of the Doubling Point Lighthouse (or anywhere else, for that matter) for an extended period of time.

The brothers gathered themselves when they observed the woman reporter and her cameraman getting into their van – slamming the doors with quite a bit of attitude – and driving off at a reckless speed for the small road. Following not too long after, the Sanders parents and what looked to be like a young daughter. They were walking together in the general direction of the lighthouse, which meant that if any of the family looked up at the barn they'd get a good if not shady look at the classic Chevy.

Dean, who had hurried over to the back side of the barn with his geek brother, patted at the left side of his jacket to make sure his father's journal was still in the inside pocket. "How long before those reporters come back, I wonder."

Sam frowned. "Honestly, I'd rather not know, but I have a feeling that tells me not very long at all."

"You and your feelings," Dean sighed.

"Maybe I'll be wrong about it this time."

Dean gave his brother one quick clap on the back. "Unlikely, but maybe it'll come to help us."

"I don't really want to tell you this, Dean, but we're going to need all the help we can get."

Fear replaced the irritatingly soft curves of Dean's face – how a horribly awkward kid who couldn't get a date to any of the middle school dances to save his soul could wind up looking like that…. "Another one of your premonitions, Sammy?"

_Sammy_, who had always though himself attractive (but not overly so as to make him say "How's it going, beautiful?" and kiss his reflection in the morning, unlike someone he knew), had always longed to have the kind of luck Dean had. Surely Dean Winchester had to have pleased Lady Luck something awful to have turned around from being that ugly a duckling, but on second thought… no amount of luck would be able to help the brothers now if Sam's feelings turned true.

"No, and I don't know whether to be thankful for that or not. It's just this, this comfort beneath all the anxiety and dread I've been feeling since we came here. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's like I'm drawn to this place or something, like it's my home."

Dean's expression was gleaming and not because of the light rain, but from strained amusement. "Sleeping pills, Sammy. When we make it through this, I'm buying you a whole truck load of sleeping pills."

"_**If **we make it though this."_

&&&

It was a wonder the people on Arrowsic Island didn't get robbed of all their worldly possessions on top of having their family members killed.

As Sam had predicted, no one seemed to lock their doors. By the time the drizzle had pumped itself up to an actual rain, in less time than it took for Sam and Dean to wipe off their shoes on the mat on the back porch, they were inside the Sanders home. Apart from the fact that they were a little stupid for not locking up their house, it was a rather warm place that sucked the Winchester duo into its apple pie smelling atmosphere.

Dean slid the glass patio door shut behind him, unable to see very well in the darkness he had walked into. As his eyes adjusted to the lack of lighting in the kitchen, shimmering a faint green from the neon glow of the microwave and stove clocks, he stared at the back of Sam's curly head.

"What are you standing around here for?" Dean whispered, just in case there was an spit fire of a dog waiting in the basement to bite his off manhood – that and bark loud enough to make the neighbors suspicious. "The kid's bedroom is on the second floor, remember? He hadn't come _down_ for breakfast."

Sam raised his right arm, waved impatiently with his hand.

"What? Are knifes going to come flying at me again?"

He could sense Sam making a face at him, could positively feel it.

With an eye roll, Dean crossed his arms across his chest and leaned back on his heels. "I'd kind of like to get away from the window," he muttered softly.

Turning around, Sam gave his brother a glare, mouthed at him to shut it.

Dean raised his eyebrows, waited for an explanation that this time, unlike at the lighthouse, came without having to ask.

"I thought I heard something, but over your heavy breathing I couldn't tell what it was," Sam clarified.

"But I wasn't breathing heavy," Dean said tentatively, a drop of panic dancing with his words.

Even in the dark Sam's face draining of color was highly noticeable, as well as the whites of his eyes as they widened well beyond their normal state. His mouth opened to say something, but nothing came out, and he turned his head to look a little too quickly around the room.

Dean laughed. "Just kidding, Sammy."

"You're such an ass," he spat. "Let's find Adam's room before you break something expensive."

Giggling like a school girl, Dean followed his brother through the kitchen and into the front hall. "Oh, c'mon, Sammy. It was funny." He started to pant heavily behind his brother's ear as they climbed the stairs to the second floor, but that didn't last long before he reverted back to tittering.

"Honesty, Dean, sometimes I wonder how we can possibly be related."

"It was funny!"

"You're a buffoon," Sam ranted. "They must've given you something at the hospital that destroyed your frontal lobe."

"It was funny, Sammy."

The kitchen, the entrance to the basement, and the stairway to the second story were all butted up against the side of the house nearest the old barn and waiting Impala. There was only one way for anyone to turn when they reached the second floor landing, and that was right. "You were the eighteen-year-old at the back of the room who giggled every time you heard the word teat in your senior year science class, weren't you? Of course you were, you're that goddamn immature."

"_Funny_, Sammy. You know, affording light mirth and laughter: amusing, seeking or intending to amuse. You're suppose to laugh."

"They switched me at birth," Sam continued on sourly, "I'm sure of it." He went down the hallway, aiming for the last door on the right: it screamed teenage boy, what with the No Trespassing sign and that Pussycat Dolls poster. "I was really born to a Russian physicist or something, one who's in the running for a Nobel Peace Prize, and his wife who writes plays. But some bonehead at the hospital made a mistake and I get stuck with you."

"I love you, too, Sammy," Dean replied happily, snorting one last time before his brother reached Adam's bedroom door.

Sam, after pulling his sweatshirt sleeve down to cover his hand, opened the door with a swift, rather perturbed kind of tug. There were stairs behind the door, steeps ones, but Sam didn't see them.

There was a man standing just inside the door, built like a turtle and as tall as one too, but to Sam he might as well have been King Kong's brother. This stranger filled the doorway, dressed in sky blue surgical scrubs and hat – stained with dark red splotches all over the place – with a dripping, blood covered saw held up in his right hand.

"Ah, Samuel Winchester. I wasn't expecting you so soon," he began, but Sam didn't listen to the rest of what the doctor wanted to tell him.

Letting out a howl of fright, Sam jumped backward and slammed himself into the wall. Either he kicked the door closed or the doctor did it for him, because the attic door with the Cabaret girls poster closed with a shotgun blast like cracking noise.


	8. Eight

**Chapter Eight ; Be As One With Me**

Every time Sam shut his eyes, either to blink or test the reality of the moment, he could see that doctor hovering in front of him. It was clear as day, the shining black eyes, the yellow-green rot smile, the dripping saw, and in order for Sam's heart not to explode from fear he wouldn't allow himself to close his eyes. That didn't work so well, not when his eyeballs felt like they were being molested by sandpaper, but he hated the feeling of being expected even more.

Expected. That doctor, the one who was surely killing all the poor islanders, had Sam's name written down somewhere in his little black book. They weren't suppose to have met this soon, but if Sam had had his way they wouldn't have met at all – not when the main emotion, on top of the surprise and fear and shock, was relieved comfort. Comfort, for God's sake, like Sam should have known this doctor, like he was connected to the madman in some way. Worse yet, in the brief time that door had been open and the doctor had been standing there blocking the way, at the back of Sam's mind the feeling of belonging had awoken.

Sam belonged on the island, and that realization was the one that sent him sliding down onto the motel floor with the dead look in his eyes.

"Christ, Sammy, just tell me what happened."

Exasperated, that's what Dean was. His brother hadn't told him anything since the incident over on Arrowsic Island, at the Sanders's place, he had only marched out of the house with a grave look on his face. All Dean had found in the last hour – that's how long it took to make sure the house was clean of any trace of them and exactly the way it had been before the Winchesters set foot in it, to leave the island and find a place to spend the night in Georgetown – was that "there has been another one". That was all Sammy had been willing to say, just those five words over and over again, and it was ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.

How were the brothers Winchester suppose to fight evil if they never talked about the evil they were trying to fight? How was Dean _not_ suppose to feel fully terrified for his little brother if he was just going to lay there on the floor with that vacant look to his face?

Kneeling on the carpeting in front of his brother, hands on either one of Sam's knees and leaning forward so far they could have rubbed noses – but that would have just been awkward, let alone have a mighty degree of wrongness to it – Dean hissed.

"Sammy," he said loudly, like his brother was legally deaf instead of in shock, like the only way for the kid to come out of it was significant hearing damage. "What the fuck did you see, Sammy? What happened?"

A shiver ran down Sam's spine, one strong enough to make his entire body rattle. His eyes seemed to be glued to what little sliver of Driftwood Motel room door he could see, almost in anticipation for the doctor to pass through the wood and make shoe indentations in the plush tan carpeting of room number twelve. Maybe he was doing that right now, metamorphosising just in front of the peephole but Sam couldn't see it because Dean's big head was in the way.

"You're scaring the shit out of me, Sammy. Stop it!"

"I told you," he replied weakly, "that I wasn't ever going to answer to that name again."

Dean smiled, glad to see his brother hadn't had a psychotic break after all. "I don't recall you ever telling me that."

"Well, now I'm telling you that, so do you mind backing away a little? You're weirding me out with the closeness and the touching."

Doing as he had been asked, Dean scooted backward but not far enough to make Sam completely happy. "Tell me what happened, will ya? All I saw was you open the door and freak out, jump back far enough to crack the drywall. Thankfully you didn't, the last thing we need is to have cops busting through that door."

"I saw him," Sam put simply. "He was standing just inside the doorway to Adam's room."

"Saw who, Sammy?"

Sam shook his head, causing Dean to sigh.

"Who'd you see, _Sam_?" he asked, visibly annoyed with his brother's dislike of the childhood nickname.

"Your mad doctor, the one Gweneth says has never existed. I opened the door and there he was…. There's been another one, Dean. I don't know who or where or when, but it happened."

Since he had first learned of Sam's gift (or curse, whichever it was suppose to be), Dean had teased him about it. It was a mask, that joking, one to cover up the sincere worry Dean had been constantly feeling. It wasn't just the fact that Sam had once been possessed, had _shot him twice_ with an empty gun, it was that his little brother could sense things that Dean couldn't. Could Sam handle that ability? Did he know how to work it, how to take control of it, how to not let it eat him alive?

"You've told me that about a million times, but thanks again – I know I can trust you if my memory ever goes down the shitter. But how do you know that? He didn't tell you, did he?" Dean frowned. "Did he tell you anything at all?"

Pausing for too long, Sam continued to stare at the motel room door. "No. No, he didn't say anything. Meyers was just standing there with a dripping saw in his hands, that's how I know he's killed someone else."

Rolling back on his heels, turning so he could look more intensely at the door than his brother ever was, Dean felt like he needed to punch something. Or at least be armed with a gun and rock salt bullets, if the mad doctor was going to bless them with his visit like he and Sam feared they'd better be prepared. "Why do we always have to get the experiment happy, lunatic doctors? Couldn't we mess with a rabid pink, cartoon bunny just once? I'm getting so sick of men in scrubs."

"You and me both," Sam replied glumly. "But seriously, Dean. I saw him standing in the doorway with a saw in his hand, dripping fresh blood. I knew we weren't going to find anything in Adam's room, at least I thought we wouldn't, so that's why I left. I'm sorry."

He shook his head. "Believe me, I'm just glad to hear you talking."

That comment was enough to peel Sam's gaze away from the only escape from the motel room (save a window that only opened to a wonderful measurement of an inch and a half, damn safety devices). He looked hard at Dean, at the deep lines starting to form in his face and at his sunken eyes. "When was the last time you slept?"

Dean shrugged one shoulder and got to his feet. "A while ago. I'd kind of like to be sure that I'll sleep throughout the night, that you won't come up to me when I'm fast asleep and empty two rounds into my head. You pulled that trigger twice, kiddo, and nothing happened, I'm sure it weighs on your mind real good and heavy."

"We're dealing with a doctor who's slaying young people in their homes, the place they feel the safest, and you bring up something that happened so long ago?" Sam sighed, rose shakily to his feet and sat down on his designated twin bed. "You know I didn't mean to do it, you know I never meant what I said to you."

In the amber glow of the desk lamp, it was difficult to ignore the pale sheen Dean's skin had taken on over the past weeks as he pulled his t-shirt over his head. He could act all he wanted to, but as Sam knew it was like trying to imagine the back of Dean's hair not sticking up from the friction and static that cotton shirt made when being pulled off – it just wasn't going to happen. Dean was still holding a grudge and all the charisma and sexual innuendos in the world couldn't cover it up.

"Do I?" he asked, staring at his hands as he tugged his grey t-shirt from his wrists.

Sam pulled his laptop to himself, flipped it open, pressed a button and waited impatiently for it to boot. "I asked you if you wanted to converse. I believe my precise words were, 'do we need to talk about this?' Dean, you sure do always pick the finest times to bring up your enmities."

His older brother saying nothing, just kind of snorting as he rolled his t-shirt into a ball and stuffed it into his carry-all, Sam assumed he had used too fancy a word. "Enmity, it means ill will." Not that he meant it to, but his explanation came out annoyed, like he resented the fact that his brother had never read an eight-hundred page book in his life.

Dean looked up from his bag, shot his brother the coldest look he had ever managed to create, it even looked like he was about to cry. "Go back to California," he said, voice shaky.

The laptop computer had loaded, the blue and green glow from the welcome screen attacking the normal pigmentation of Sam's face. On any normal night, like the short time he had spent in college what seemed like a hundred years ago, he would have had his beloved computer plugged into a phone jack already, would be at the Google webpage and just beginning his search for much needed information. On a normal night, in a comfortable locale, Sam would spend hours working the computer, until his shoulders stiffened up and well beyond. On a normal night Sam wouldn't be needed to search for information about ghosts and demons and maniacal doctors, but facts to mention in his thesis paper. On a normal night he had never needed to worry about having a fight with his brother, a very big fight that could change the face of everything, but this – like all of the millions of nights Samuel Winchester had seen – was anything but normal.

"What?" Sam asked as he absentmindedly unplugged the nightstand phone from the wall and stuck in his computer modem jack instead. He double-clicked the Internet icon and signed himself into his ISP account, looked back to Dean, who was focusing too much on his travel bag.

"Go back to California," Dean repeated. "You don't respect me, I don't respect you, so let's just save ourselves a lot of pain and anguish by you packing up and walking out that door. It'll be just like old times."

Sam laughed slightly, sadly ignoring the triple digit amount of e-mails waiting for him in his mailbox and going to his favorite search engine, typing in _Dr. Meyers Arrowsic Island_ and hitting the enter button. "What are you talking about, Dean, that I don't respect you? Of course I do."

A few dating ads, an exiles of Maine guestbook, a breast augmentation specialist link (how that got there…), some University Archives, and what Sam had been looking for. It was a one liner description, the title only a web address, but it had a few key words; Dr. Jonathan Meyers, slayings, and Arrowsic Island. The link was broken, but at least Sam could refine his search, and boy did he get some hits.

"Our bastard's got himself a name," Sam said happily. "Jonathan Meyers. This newspaper article is dated 1946, when they apprehended him and his nurse wife, an Emily Reusch, on Arrowsic Island for a series of disappearances and murders that stretched back six years, so 1940. But before that, you'll be glad to hear, he worked in New York state at a sanitarium for the criminally insane. I guess these mad doctors, they just love you, Dean."

He seemed pained by that last comment, like it had sliced through his heart. "Yeah, well, I only wish you did."

Sam sighed. "What's gotten into you, Dean? You know I love you, that I'd die for you – you're my brother – and that I respect you more than anyone else. I'm sorry for what happened at the asylum and I regret not forcing you to talk about what happened there, but let's not get it in the way of finding this guy and flushing him out."

"Somehow I don't believe that, Sammy," Dean replied. "Somehow, what you said to me back there and _how_ you said it made it seem like you meant every last word. Of course, I'm an idiot, so what do I know?"

Going to interrupt his brother with an important retort, Sam was only met with the palm of his sibling's hand.

"Don't you fucking dare talk over me, Sam," Dean warned. "I can't understand it, you never say one word to me about anything when I need to hear it – when you're so keen on being rid of me you try to shoot me, when you see another crazy doctor in some kid's doorway, when you're being kept awake by nightmares. But _now_, when I'm trying to spill my heart out here, you feel like actually talking to me."

"You really do want me to go, don't you?" Sam asked softly.

Dean was getting so upset he was having a hard time kicking off his boots. "Come off it, Sammy, you're happy with that. Just admit it, admit that you're thrilled with the chance to go back to your college and your friends, to a normal life without me in it."

"No," he denied the final part of the last accusation.

"Then at least be honest with me. I'm begging you here, Sammy, just… just tell me what happened to you in some dead kid's house when I ask about it, okay?"

Sam nodded slowly, skimming over a new article he had clicked on to. "I will, Dean, I promise."

From his position on the foot of his bed, Dean sighed. "I've always been able to tell when you're lying, Sammy, but all right…. What have you got?"

Happy that the fight hadn't been as bad as it could have been –_"I don't need you, Sam. I can do this alone, so just go back to Stanford, to your worthless arrogant college. **Leave**, Sam!" _– the youngest Winchester boy _ummed_ and turned back to the newspaper article. Figuring his brother wouldn't want the entire thing laid out in front of him, Sam picked out the finer points.

"Meyers worked in upstate New York, at the Wade House for the Criminally Insane, from 1913 to 1940. He was a bit of a Brad Pitt there, became the go-to guy for everything from the child rapists to the mentally plagued–"

Dean laughed softly, mimiking Sam as he started peeling himself out of his jeans. "'Mentally plagued'?"

"Well, 'the other crazies' seems quite rude. But, anyway, it says here he married the nurse who worked at the sanitarium with him in 1936, that Emily Reusch I mentioned, they never had kids. They moved at the hight of Meyers's career to Arrowsic Island, reportedly because back home he operated on the general public in the living room of his house and couldn't take being the brunt of suspicion when they died or came out of the operations a little off."

"You see the irony in that don't you, Sammy boy?" Dean stuffed his jeans in his carry-all bag and traipsed across the room in his shorts to the bathroom.

Over the running water in the sink, Sam realized that not answering to his nickname was useless. "What, about the living room?"

Dean popped his head out of the bathroom, face dripping, and waved his wet and readied toothbrush at his kid brother. "Yeah. People used to put their families' dead bodies in there, final goodbye's or something like that while they snapped a few photos of dead ol' Grandma. Why do you think they started calling it the _living_ room?" Dean paused, looked down at his blue toothbrush and disappeared back into the bathroom. "I don't know, I thought it would be interesting to point out."

Sam smirked, shook his head. "Okay, so they moved to Arrowsic in 1938 and bought a nice house on the far side of the island away from everyone else, you know for privacy and all that jazz." He cast a longing look at his brother, walking out of the restroom scratching an itch on his upper thigh, and yearned for a little bit of privacy himself.

"Privacy," Dean scoffed, throwing his carry-all bag on the floor along with a couple of extra pillows that he didn't need. "Where's the fun in _privacy_, eh Sammy?" He threw an enigmatic smile at his little brother, plopped down on his stomach on top of the motel's ocean blue sheets.

Sighing heavily, Sam cocked his head. "I don't know, I can see where they were coming from."

The extra pillows Dean didn't want were right below his nightstand, he reached down with his left arm and picked one up to toss at Sam's head. "Who's the sex fiend now, Sammy? And here I thought you were the innocent one."

"No," Sam protested and threw the pillow back with a good amount of force, "it's still you. I was talking about not having to listen to your Adriana Lima fantasies."

"Hey, one day it's going to happen."

"I thought you had a complex when it comes to women who are taller than you? Yeah, you do. You know if she ever wears heels, which is always, you'd have to look up, right?"

Dean smiled dreamily, arms folded underneath his chin. "For Adriana, man, I'd lick your s–"

"_Oh, God, Dean_. Don't!"

He made a rather unpleasant face. "Shoe, Sammy. For Adriana I'd lick your shoe. Lord knows how much dog crap you stepped in today alone. Look, I may be disgusting and vile, but that would just be an all time low for me. God, I'd rinse my mouth out with lye after just saying something like _that_. Have you no faith in me?"

Sam groaned his answer. "I'm taking a scaldingly hot shower after this, scrub off my skin."

Giggling shortly, Dean nodded toward the laptop computer. "So what else about our doctor friend?"

Rolling his head, trying to snap his stiff neck, Sam looked back to the computer screen. "Regular Cleaver family minus the kids; went to church, joined in and organized local festivities, even helped pay for the lighthouse repairs. They were the perfect neighbors, everyone loved them, and it seems like no one knew that back in New York they were wanted for plucking folks off of the street and experimenting on them. Uh," he went back to past pages to see what he had missed. "Around two years into their stay, he began taking Arrowsic residents from their bedrooms at night and carrying them gagged and bound to his basement. They ranged from thirty, the oldest anyone knew about, to thirteen, the youngest… most died, the ones who didn't were returned to their beds along with the dead and their families found them brain damaged beyond repair."

"_Thirteen_?" Dean asked, repulsed. "What the fuck was he doing to thirteen-year-old kids?"

Sam bit his lip shortly, reading over a section of the newspaper article that proved his earlier mentioned bad feelings true, but he decided it would be best not to mention it for Dean's sake. "Do you remember Ellicott's journal?"

"How could I forget?"

"Well, multiply that by ten and throw in a little extra depraved behavior," Sam explained vaguely, but the wave of sickness he was feeling was evident in his voice.

Dean propped himself up on his elbows. "You're kidding me. How could anything be worse than Ellicott?"

"Don't make me tell you, I just might throw up." But in actuality, Sam didn't want to have to tell Dean anything that might distract him from the task at hand, might make him worry about his own fate. "It was horrible stuff, I'll let you in on that, and in 1946 Meyers and his wife were finally apprehended and put in jail. They gave the cops the murder/suicide card the March night they were arrested, did it in their cell. It doesn't say anything else, that's all I could find."

Sam shut his computer down in disgust, pulled the modem jack out of the wall and reconnected the motel room phone. With a violent shudder, he got to his feet and began heading to the other side of the room.

"Where are you going?" Dean asked, not rolling onto his back to see that his brother was walking to the bathroom.

"Shower," Sam answered simply.

After a pause, one long enough to allow his kid brother into the bathroom and to start closing the door, Dean spoke again. "Remember what I told you, about being honest with me?"

Sam sighed, his fingers catching the bathroom door before it slammed shut with a crack. "Yeah, I remember."

"Good, so you won't mind telling me what he did to some of those people."

The shining white toilet was waiting for Sam to vomit his stomach contents into it, the seat still up from when Dean had used it when they first arrived. "You've seen _Se7en_, right?"

"I was the one stupid enough to take you along with me, yeah," Dean replied. "You threw up in my popcorn. It was just spit, actually, but it's still really gross."

"But you've seen it."

Dean rolled his eyes. "Yes," he said vexedly.

Sam couldn't stop staring at the toilet, like he was expecting it to talk to him (there was that word again), like he was waiting for the voice of Doctor Jonathan Meyers to call out to him again. "The scene for gluttony, where the killer tied the guy down to the table and forced him to eat until he died… imagine your organs being on the menu instead of cheeseburgers and pizza fries."

No reply came from the twin bed closest to the motel room door, their only exit if the doctor showed up to haul one of the Winchester brothers away to his basement room and to try to relieve a sibling of something that Meyers had announced on his arrest day was his main goal in life to conquest – a goal Sam hoped Dean would learn about no sooner than after they got out of this hunt alive. The only noise from the bedroom was a thick, repelled silence.

"Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to scrub off my skin now. I'll be out in ten." And Sam closed the door to vomit in relative privacy.

There was a better than definate chance that one of them was going to die quite sooner than expected, of that Sam was far too certain.


	9. Nine

**Chapter Nine ; Acid Rain and the Death of Innocence**

It had never seemed hazardous before, not when it had first started to happen. Sammy would dream reading a line in a book he had never read before or dream doing something specific during a certain part of a certain verse of a particular song, and a few weeks later it would happen, down to the finest detail. It had been weird, yes, that constant feeling of deja vú, but certainly not dangerous. But one day, the harmlessness of it all slowly began to turn.

Overnight it didn't happen, though Sam sometimes wished it had. He had ignored the warning signed before, all those years of warning signs, so if it had just slapped him in the face….

He had been six when he dreamt an orange tabby cat crossing the road in front of his friend Jimmy's house, going from a red mailbox to a grass clippings pile – left to right diagonally – and stopping in the middle of the pavement with its right front paw in the air as someone's lawnmower fired up. Fourteen days later, as little Sammy left his best friend's house to walk home, it happened exactly as it did in his dream. Hit left toe on raised piece of flagstone on front path, mutter made-up curse word and look up, see cat run run running across the road, see cat stop just in front of a large pot hole, watch cat stiffen from the sound of a starting lawnmower. Turned out, five minutes after that encounter the cat was struck by that same lawnmower and acquired fatal injuries.

At eleven his father came home two days late from a hunt, a gash across the side of his face and his left arm held tenderly in his right, stumbling over the foyer runner just as Sam had dreamed he would a month before. His father's prey, a modern day headless horseman, had been fairly upset with the whole concept of being vanquished and took its rage out on poor ol' John Winchester. His arm had shattered, the cut in his cheek so deep Sammy had sworn he could see his father's teeth through it, but the job had been completed.

Dean had a baseball accident when Sammy was eight, one bad enough to convince their father that the time was finally over for normal boyish activities. The training had started up to a full, well oiled swing and Dean hadn't minded at all – that baseball gave him a black eye for what seemed like two whole months – but Sammy had been the one left to wonder, "If I hadn't had that dream, would it have still happened?"

The answer, as Sam had concluded long ago, was one not to dwell on. No one had control over their dreams, so it was rather inane to sit around and ask questions about that sort of thing. Sam had dreams, sometimes in which good things happened, sometimes in which very bad things happened, sometimes in which neither good or bad things happened, and he couldn't ever change that. But maybe if he had paid a little more attention to them (certainly he should have, what with having had them for the whole of his twenty-two years), maybe if he hadn't kept them all locked down deep within himself, Jessica would still be alive.

He couldn't rewrite history, wasn't smart enough to build himself a time machine and go back in time, had a hard time dealing with only having Jessica with him in his dreams (as horrifying as they were). But for the moment that wasn't the main item on his overly served plate. Sam didn't save his beloved Jessica, but maybe – as terrible and painful as it was to even think – he wasn't suppose to.

Maybe fate had it in for him to lose her, to have Jessica ripped from him like that, so he could save Dean. Granted, Sam had never actually _believed_ in fate, not wholly anyway. He had always been the kid who groaned inside when someone mentioned "fate", like it was a bad joke someone had told, but lying on top of his bed sheets in that Driftwood Motel room – the air still stinking of disgust and paranoia – he might have believed in fate just a little bit more.

According to the clock/radio residing on the nightstand between the two twin beds, fate had slapped him across the face somewhere around one in the morning. Currently it was 3:21AM, meaning that Sam had been lying on his back staring at the ceiling for close to two and a half hours now and counting. The left side of his face still stung something like fire, as if that fate slapping hadn't happened two hours and twenty one, two minutes ago but two seconds ago. Whenever the metaphorical bitch slap had occurred, the snoring mass of blankets on the other bed was positively clueless as to what movie reel in Sam's mind refused to stop playing.

Though the youngest Winchester brother was awake, fully aware of the fact that he was at least somewhere in the Land of Limbo (between sleep and wakefulness), he was able to see the dream that had woken him play itself out on the ceiling. It was being beamed onto the white ceiling by the projector of Sam's mind's eye, a cruel gesture to ensure that little Samuel Winchester wouldn't be ignoring anymore warning signs… not that he could ever look away from _these_.

Way back when, the police had come to the death plagued island with a firm step because they had finally figured out what was going on, had a clue to who was depraved enough to do such heinous things to their good spirited neighbors. The people in New York State had read the newspaper articles, had seen the film footage as they sat in the movie theatres waiting for their Audrey Hepburn film to begin. Those suits had sunk into their seats with dread every time something new came up, every time someone else died and they had to hear about it, and they had been overwhelmed with the feeling of familiarity. That was why they had called the frantic police force of Sagadahoc County, that was why the first words Chief Lieutenant Graver had said into the phone when he called up Sheriff Lunday were, "So that's where that sick son of a bitch ran off to."

That conversation must have been an embarrassment to Lunday, his cheeks burning scarlet for not realizing the newest resident to Arrowsic Island was a madman with a pension for blood. How much shame must he have felt for allowing the deaths to happen? To know that all those people could have been saved? Lunday watched over the county after all, it was his duty to know how many lunatics were walking around his land.

It was as if Meyers had attacked those kids right in front of Lunday's eyes, like he had _watched_ this guy force a woman to eat her own uterus – "I shall cure them, I shall cure them all from this disease of whores!" – and he had simply chosen to look away.

Hadn't he felt like crap.

Lunday should have known what was going on, that's what he might have been convinced of as he kicked himself, he should have realized the monster walking his streets and done something about it. Eventually he did, do something about it, but not soon enough to quell a beast's thirst, not soon enough to protect Dean Winchester in any way possible.

From the grave, propelled by the urge to continue his life's work whether dead or alive, doctor Jonathan Meyers plucked out all of the bad seeds. "The Infected", that's what he had called them, "the Afflicted". He would watch them, was most definately watching one right now under the cover of darkness, and would comprise his list as the infected slept soundly in their beds. Black eyes melding with the dark shadows, nigh impossible to pin down even if one was staring directly at them, simply watching, waiting. A face, paler than light, glowing angrily as it took stock of sin.

Meyers, not so much a ghost as a collection of hate and misconstrued notions, had been convinced since day one of his abilities. It was his duty and his alone to cure the world of what he considered a disease, of something not natural that slowly turned people into piles of rotting flesh. And on the ceiling, being played over and over, was one brother's death.

_It was another secret operation room, one buried under a house and hidden behind a padlocked door. One small room and though it had one exit, it was without a single option of escape. In life the Infected had been bound with rope, gagged with socks, and carried to this room to meet something far beyond their worst nightmares. Much alike in death, the doctor's victims were taken to the room in their dreams, something out of the Matrix, and that began the ticking of the deathwatch. It came from their very core, the ticking clock, and it was the loudest within Dean._

_He rested under the milky glow of a light that seemed not to have a place in the room – a cone of dusky hope that danced down from the spot of dark ceiling above Dean's head, keeping the rest of the room in blackest shadow. What lay beyond the feeble ray of hope, of faith, Dean seemed not concerned. With eyes still closed, rhythm of breathing slow and steady, he looked unaware of the situation he was in. Naïve to the leather straps around both ankles and wrists that tied his body down to a rusting surgical gurney, blind to the metal bit passing between his teeth and fastened securely to the device locking his head into one and only one position, dead to the other longer leather fasteners around his torso that further secured him to the ancient gurney – Dean was the epitome of that old saying, of ignorance being bliss._

_Alone in the basement room, that's what Dean was, but then again the farthest thing from it._

_He knew this, for Dean's hands balled into fists, rolling over so that each thumb faced the now forgotten night sky. _

_Creaking wheels carried a surgical tray to the Infected one's death table, with no visible force behind the movement. Tools that went uncleaned for centuries waited in tense excitement for their moment to shine, to cut and to slice and to obliterate. They vibrated oh so slightly, that was how wound up they were to be used, to destroy a perfectly good life. Maybe, though, they shook because they were under the radar of two shining orbs._

_Beyond the cone of Dean's unconscious and feverently denied faith, the doctor stood waiting and watching. It was more sensed than seen, Jonathan Meyers and his twice dead eyes, but they were there sure as stone. Possibly _because _of Dean's adamantly disaffirmed faith, Meyers dared not approach the young buck so soon. Faith, admitted or denied, was a very nasty thing to mess with. Spoken verses, unfortunately, weren't yet out of the equation._

_Jerking lightly, as if the doctor's words came to him on the stinger of a bee, Dean pressed his eyes closed to the point where his face no longer looked soft and calm, but like a choppy sea beneath thunderheads. He was waiting for that first thunderclap, the one right above him that would scare him no matter how prepared for the noise he was. Garbled words stripped of sound escaped his gagged mouth, prayers to a God Dean never once declared his belief in._

"_Worry not, Mr. Winchester," the doctor stopped his gibberish poem to say far too softly for a man with such a harsh and hate filled face. "Worry not," he stated again, almost singing his words._

_Dean's body went rigid, every muscle one was able to see above and below his boxer briefs become tense enough to tear with ease. _

"_I'll take very good care of you, Dean." For a madman, Jonathan Meyers had a nice, albeit terrifying, bedside manner. "I'm going to fix you, cut this disease from you, make you as you should and deserve to be. Dean Winchester, I'll give you what you've always wanted if you'll simply cooperate with me. If you would just relax for me, if you would allow me to take this sickness from you, you'll finally be able to have what you've wished every night of your life to obtain."_

_The Infected one, a moron of a man but with a heart of gold, went calm without so much as a moment's hesitation. His eyes opened, a shining hazel brilliance meeting the hazy glow of hope, and his silent prayers became no more._

"_Yes," the doctor read his victim__'__s thoughts as he stepped out of the shadows and into the cone of light. "Yes, Dean, you'll finally be able to have that. It wasn't that you could never grasp hold of it before, dear boy, but with this disease tainting your blood you simply couldn't reach far enough to wrap your hand around it. But I will help you, Mr. Winchester. I promise I shall cure you, and I am not a man to go back on my word."_

_Dean's cone of murky light, whether he was aware of it or not, became brighter. It was still not enough to light the entire chamber of death, but it was strong enough to erupt Jonathan Meyers's black eyes with fire and had enough strength to light what horrific operation was to come._

_Meyers stepped up to the gurney, pulled the cart of surgical tools closer to his left hip, and along with the creaking wheels came his frayed-looking nurse. _

"_The pain," Doctor began placidly, "will be but a small price for you to pay, Mr. Winchester. For you, I assure thee, it will be more than worth it."_

_Pressing the palms of his hands into the rust pooled gurney, Dean softly closed his eyes._

"_No, no, Dean, I won't do that to you. I'll make this most comfortable for you, because I know how this disease is something you do not embrace warmly at all. It's as you say, Dean: with it you'll never be able to truly have what you so desperately want. That's how you got it in the first place, this sickness, is it not?"_

_It was impossible for him to nod, but the idiot with the heart of gold tried._

_Jonathan Meyers held out his right hand and his nurse wife, an Emily Reusch who at one point in time might have been beautiful if she hadn't fallen into the lot she had fallen into, firmly placed a twittering scalpel in his palm._

"_This might sting a little, boy," he explained in a voice that suddenly turned hard and cold as a gravestone. Meyers raised his head, looking forward at nothing but boring into Sam at the same time. "Hurry, Samuel, tick tock. You know what happens to everyone you ever love."_

_And the deathwatch grew louder, faster. _

Sam rolled over onto his side, forcing himself to look away from the film rewinding itself on the ceiling, soon to be played again. He focused now not on the lumpy mound of blankets that hid his older brother's snoring body, but at the shadows behind it, at the two small gleaming orbs that were close to impossible to lock down on.

"Go away," Sam demanded strictly.

The black, glossy eyes moved as if the doctor had shifted his vision to the youngest man in the room. For a moment they disappeared, but when the shining resumed Sam concluded that the sick bastard had merely blinked.

"I told you to go away, Doctor Meyers. I won't let you hurt anyone anymore, most importantly my brother, so get the fuck away from here. I'd tell you to go to hell, give you a little direction as to where to go, but even that place is too good for you."

The eyes moved to a diagonal line, most likely because Meyers had smirked – Sam could see the shine from the rotting teeth in what little light there was in the motel room – and cocked his head to the side.

Sam sat up, placed his naked feet onto the plush sand carpeting, and bared his pristine teeth in a sneer. "Don't make me tell you again, you vile fuck."

He didn't need to, for the doctor left the motel room and went back to whatever final resting place the police had fixed him up with.

Dean groaned under all his blankets, shifted around on the mattress, but didn't wake.

Unfortunately for Sam, he wasn't able to settle back down into bed like his brother for the rest of the night – day, rather. He didn't so much as flinch from his newly found sitting position, couldn't even register the pain in his hunched shoulders or slouching back. Sam had more important things to acknowledge.

His brother was in serous danger now, far worse than a baseball to the eye or an injured rib or diaphragm during a hunting incident long since past. Dean was going to die if he wasn't careful, surely even if he was. That was enough to assure that Sam wasn't going to ignore his feelings anymore, wasn't going to shrug off his dreams for a second time to sit back and watch as this sick bastard of a doctor carted Dean off to a basement room to do God-knows-what to him.

So Samuel Winchester sat until dawn at the edge of his bed, keeping a vigil on the room for a return of the doctor and listening to the loud ticking of his brother's deathwatch.


	10. Ten

**Chapter Ten ; Can't You Feel the Power?**

It was a pounding in his ears, Dean's ticking deathwatch, and that constant noise made pressure build up beneath his skin. It came to the point where, sitting in the town record hall, Sam wanted to scream loud enough to pop his lungs and tear off his flesh while he was at it. When he didn't exsanguinate, he'd also lop off his ears – anything to fool himself into thinking Dean really wasn't being marched down the dank hallway to his meeting with Death. If Dean wasn't doomed, all hope wasn't lost and when all hope wasn't lost Sam could go on with his life.

But, come on. How long could he keep it up? It wasn't working all that well to begin with, how much longer could Sam go on trying to convince himself that Dean actually had a chance of seeing his next birthday? It wasn't going to happen, that next cake with twenty-eight flaming candles, and it was as cut and dry as that. As if that wasn't bad enough, Dean was sodden with will for that to happen, he was absolutely willing.

See that blonde idiot sitting across from his younger brother at the oak table, staring at the same line of words in that old, thick book for the past fifteen minutes now? That one right there? Yeah, well, he was going to die sooner rather than later and he was going to allow for it to be like that. For a filthy empty promise Dean was going to give up a fight and let himself be killed. Christ Almighty, Dean was essentially driving the knife into his heart with his own two hands over a lie. What false hope could possibly be worthy enough to die over, to let some crazed bastard kill you for?

"Yeah, how could you do that to us?" was what Sam wanted to scream at his brother. He wanted to stand up and smack his older brother across his face, the kid who at one point in time had been his hero, and ask him what the hell was going on. Sam even opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was more ticking. The deathwatch had consumed his senses so much to the point of actually taking them over, though no doubt it was only in Sam's bothered little head.

To Dean, the fallen superhero, everything in the world might as well have been made of gold. If he was willing to pounce on the chance to give up on his brother, to abandon him and leave him for the ugly world with the sharp teeth just itching to bite and chew and simply ravage, then he deserved to have the most important things in his life become hard, cold and lifeless. Well, since the number one thing in Dean's life was _already_ hard, cold and lifeless number two and down should get the curse of King Midas and the Golden Touch.

But everything in Dean's life turning to gold wouldn't stop Sam from being eaten away, from being consumed alive by the knowledge that he would be thrown to the sharks in a heartbeat over a few lousy, hollow words. It was all in his head, he knew, but as he looked down at his left hand – it was quite large, easily covering an entire section of a taxidermy petition – Sam could effortlessly see where it was fading away, fraying at the edges all because Dean Winchester was going to allow some Kook to poke around inside of him and put down the Lights Out card.

Dean yearned for something strongly enough to give up, to set down his bat and walk away from the plate at a full count, simply because of a bastard's promise. Hell, if Jonathan Meyers got cold feet, Sam would end Dean's game of life himself.

"It's something about the paint they use," Dean bored into his brother's evil thoughts loudly. "You'd never know they're certifiable."

The sound of old, thick records book sliding across the table further molested Sam's brooding. A lip curled into a grimace, he lifted his hand so as not to get a paper cut from the aged yellow pages continuing their journey to his line of vision.

"The guy looks like a freakin' Abercrombie and Fitch model," the elder finished sourly, and his wry compliments rang true.

The picture that had sparked Dean up so was held into place in the upper right hand corner of the page with a brittle, butterscotch colored piece of tape. The time locked, black-and-white photograph gave the newspaper clippings and few chicken scratch notes a face of flesh and blood; a face that looked as though it _had_ been rubbed from an Impressionist's painting heavy in oil pastels. Naturally, the photo wasn't actually formed of painter's medium, but Jonathan Meyers's face was so strong, so clear, and so downright creepy in its model quality it might as well have been.

He was standing next to his wife, a might-have-been-attractive-if-you-squinted woman who screamed of a foreign land, on the steps of all things Arrowsic's local church – the one peering out over the lake with such a crisp white paint job it was nigh blinding. Meyers was wearing a suit, possibly brown because it wasn't dark enough to be a true black, with his hair gelled back and Greek statue face held high. According to the date tightly written in the bottom corner of the photograph, it had been taken one week before the Meyers were arrested. Well, Sam wanted to point out, he certainly didn't look as if he was worried about being caught.

"The more insane they are," Dean muttered, "the better they look. I'm telling you, I must be one breath away from that lovely padded room and the cups of cheery pills." He grinned, but it quickly washed away when he noticed his brother was anything but amused.

"He's certainly gone downhill in the afterlife," he said gravely. Sam leaned forward to be closer to the picture, his elbows sliding on the open pages of the books he had been looking through. "_Really_ downhill, but I guess the realization that maggots are eating your prize winning body away'll do that to you."

One thing Sam wasn't going to be arguing about within the next century: the forever damp, salty air that seemed to be surgically attached to Arrowsic Island. For some ungodly reason, most likely straight from a wizardry book, the photograph Sam's nose was rubbing against was in pristine condition. Apart from the small, badly cut section of tape Sam would have thought the photo had been developed not three hours ago if he hadn't known better. Even the finest details he could make out; the raised grain in the wooden planks of church siding, the few bits of wind blown sand scattered across the front stoop, the (twenty, five, thirty) colored stones in the salamander broach on Emily's left breast, the almost distinguishable engraving in Jonathan's fancy shmancy cufflinks, _everything_.

Though Sam was too angry at Dean to come right out and agree with him, the moron was right about how sane Jonathan Meyers appeared to be on March 15th, 1946. Certainly no man who had a neon sign about his head saying "I be crazy!" could manage pinstripes that impossibly straight, could have his tie sit that evenly spaced between each brown lapel of his suit jacket, could have posture that friggin' perfect. Not a single strand of dark hair was out of place, nose not the least bit crooked or off center – hell the guy's entire face was perfectly proportioned, a ruler would only make it that much more obvious. Ten to one Jonathan Meyers spent longer in the bathroom than his wife and Dean combined – surely an impossible feat, but there was no other reasonable explanation to how two page spread ready the man looked.

Sam would have bet his head that the reason Jonathan had been so vain was because of the acne scars on his face, the horrifically deep and severe acne scars that looked more like third degree burns than anything else. The small picture was ghastly, so revolting that Sam wanted to gag and use the non-existent phone line to Heaven to speak with his sweet Jessica (surely she knew what kind of make-up this guy had needed to make the acne scars a little less let's-scare-the-kiddies-to-death bad). But, then came the big picture.

The Jessicaism that flashed through Sam's mind seemed to knit up the black hole in his stomach and drown out his brother's deathwatch, if only for a minute. She would have taken one look at the scars wrapped around the lower portion of Jonathan Meyers's face and said –

"DAMIRCOBS. Uh-huh. DAMIRCOBS _indeed_."

Dean blinked rather slowly. "That isn't some fancy, cut rate college… thing, is it?"

Sam, still sniffing the Meyers photograph, grinned (just when he thought all his memories of Jessica were being leeched and replaced by the images from _that night_, he remembered something as random and minute as that). "It's something Jess would say sometimes. It's one of her idioms, her style of artistic expression in the form of abbreviation. It stands for Dave Mirra's collarbone scar, you know that big nasty looking thing right on his left collarbone? Yeah, well, I know she'd say that if she ever saw this picture."

Again, the eldest Winchester brother blinked. Just what he needed, more proof positive that he was painfully slow to the catch. "Right. I understand you completely," he replied sarcastically.

"According to her, that scar is what makes Mirra attractive – 'if you take your contact lenses out', she'd say. Basically, whenever she'd be looking through a magazine or hear her girlfriends squealing about somebody she'd say DAMIRCOBS and move on. Like that Carmine Whodawhatsits. Giovina-something. I remember she tapped the television screen once, at his chin, and explained that the theory of DAMIRCOBS rationalizes why women think he's appealing."

"You let you girlfriend stare at other men's chins?"

Sam shrugged one shoulder, squinting at the finer details of Jonathan's face like the doctor's insanity would be characterized there somewhere in a pore or frown line. "As long as she didn't go around kissing those other chins, I had no problem with it."

"Yeah, well, she had a problem with her little theory, there," Dean said calmly, flipping through an old stack of newspapers. "That whole DAMERCUBS thing isn't why women freak out over Giovinaz – Carmine. It's his eyes. They're such a piercing shade of aquamarine…."

The brunette slowly lifted his head from the photograph.

"All right, so, what do you think?" Dean set the stack of newspaper headlines away loudly, looked back to the records book he had given his brother. "Meyers wasn't much for making headlines and what was leaked to the press about the murders you read about already on the internet. Guy's a freak, though, that much I'm aware of."

Sam scrolled his eyes down the records of everything he didn't want to know. If it hadn't been for the internet, as Dean had mentioned, the brothers would no doubt be trying to put together a picture puzzle in the dark. There was nothing anywhere of what was actually needed, what was crucial to saving the lives of everyone on Arrowsic Island. He should have known things were going to be hard when he met Gweneth Weiss, the woman who had watched her mother die before her very eyes.

Dean sighed and leaned back in his chair. "We know the exact date of when this bozo was born, when he got married, when he died. We know his parents' name, that he was an over-achieving child of two, that he at one point was going to become a lawyer, that his favorite color was yellow." He snorted. "But that's basically it other than that internet article you found the other day. God, everything else we've come to just mentions some award he received, some high money presentation to the church."

"Look up cover-up in the dictionary," Sam began.

"Yeah, this'll be the fucking definition."

There was silence between the two for a short while, Sam rubbing his temples and Dean trying to relieve some tension in his neck by cracking it. Finally, when no joints of Dean's wanted snap, he heaved himself back at the books.

"His work was popular, some of his speeches were mentioned in the articles. Said he believed to hold the key to helping people through… what was it called now, damn, I can't remember. Too much useless information rotting away my brain, behind that Fall Out Boy song I have stuck in my head and to the right of the pointless trivia question posted out in the foyer – what _is_ the name of the German octopus who opens jars? Uh. The disease of… of–"

"Don't hurt yourself, Dean."

He rolled his eyes. "Very funny. But, anyway, this was back when people were freaking out about sexuality – aftershocks of the era when you couldn't say breast or thigh in restaurants. Meyers, there was only a brief mention of it, specialized in the ward of the Wade House catering to the rapists and whatnot. He had been convinced he had cured them when in reality he had only made them worse, but he still went on to the rest of the patients. The guy was looked up to as a saint, Sammy, a saint. The male version of Mother-fucking-Theresa. So," he breathed, "we know his motivation and we know about his crimes. But not where he was buried so we can throw salt on his corpse and torch it."

"We'll keep looking, there's bound to be a picture of the house or something else that can help us." Sam smirked. "We can always go back to Stephanie. With what she knows already she could be of great assistance."

Dean scoffed. "Great assistance my ass, she'll drive an ax through Beauty's tank."

"The car'll need a fill up eventually, Dean. Rainbow Brite might be our only chance of destroying Meyers

_("Before it's too late, before he comes after you and leaves me without a vexingly violent pull to the diaphragm.")_

and finally putting and end to this."

Looking like he had just eaten something rancid, Dean flipped through the newspaper cuttings to look at one he had read over ten other times. "We'll keep looking through the books, the internet. We'll find something."

Sighing, Sam was about to reprimand his brother for being so childish when movement snatched him away from the conversation, a kind of sweeping motion coming from the corner of the table.

He looked down and to the right, almost felt _pulled_ to search for the culprit in that direction, and seemed to lose all control of his body. With the intention of looking behind him to see who had entered the room and passed by the brothers, Sam's eyes were lassoed and snapped to the photograph of the Meyers couple. Why, that's what Sam couldn't understand until, that is, he noticed what was so freakishly off in all the rational world.

_They were moving_.

Emily had one of her dainty gloved hands to her head, apparently either trying to keep her bonnet from flying away with the wind or her skull was going to detach itself from her neck. She was laughing silently, her straight pearly whites probably several shades lighter due to the violent shade of lipstick she was wearing (Sam assumed, of course, the photo still being black-and-white) and her somewhere-near-the-alps eyes narrowed in humor. Her other hand, thankfully aiding in what little decency there was to that moment by still being attached to her body, was slipped through Meyers's gentlemanly offered arm, fingers outstretched on her right hip. A single cotton rose swayed with the breeze.

Now, even though the people in the photograph thought themselves in a Harry Potter novel, Emily Reusch might have passed off as something close to normal. The thing that was really worrying Sam was the way Jonathan Meyers was acting.

The doctor was staring straight into the camera lens, which in this Twilight Zone moment was Samuel Winchester's corneas. Apart from an occasionally blinking set of eyes, there was nothing that might have indicated that Meyers was moving… until he cracked a demonic smile brighter than any sun and chose to show his amusement in whatever tickled Emily so. The _really_ unsettling thing was that Sam could hear that laughter – in his head, not through his ears – and he didn't like what he heard behind it at all.

"Tick tock, Samuel. Tick. Tock."

And the pressue was spitting his skin, tearing a pathway to his raw and aching soul for disease to nest in and infest and destroy.


	11. Eleven

There's a quick reference to the plotline of _Morningstar_ in here. Also, I was having some serious issues with uploading my documents earlier (I couldn't, at all) but, now everything seems to be all right. I'm telling you this just in case it happens again. On with the angst!

**Chapter Eleven ; This Silence Isn't Fooling Anyone**

An airy, harmonic song drilled its way into Sam's head, cut and sawed and hacked deep into the reaches of his very being. Though its manner of travel might have been rocky and harsh, its texture certainly wasn't; the sound was much like silk. It was an angel's touch against his skin, cool and beckoning – a siren drawing a sailor to the depths of the sea.

Darting eyes brought Sam back to the Meyers photograph, to a mad doctor who was as he should have been: a grainy product of ink and carbon. He was no longer pelting out an ominous message of a brother's death, but an image of a stolen moment in time.

Having evidence that the song scenting the air with the smell of a lovely summer's day in a graveyard wasn't coming at all from Meyers, Sam rolled his eyes further back into his head and waded out into the water. Calm waves kissed his legs, whispering tales of a long lost love, a poor red rose once vibrant but now wilted and the brown of eternal sleep. It was so beautiful, the song, so full of sorrow… how Sam's heart was breaking! A mourning soul out in the water, there, aglow in the moonlight, forever to sing its despair laced woes – maybe it would finally find peace if he came to it, if two lost beings were found instead of just the one (leaving the other to wander for all of eternity in this ethereal hell).

An outreaching hand led to nothing, only starlight entwined itself around his fingers, but the fallen angel kept weaving its tapestry of pain. Tears might sting, but those words sliced Sam deeply. He knew that agony, knew it well, and as the weeping song continued to rise upward to the heavens he felt that wrenching loss anew. He felt it so greatly that surely his heart must burst, explode from the desperation black as the sea's darkest depths and in effect give greater light to the stars.

But no aching heart did break, merely joined in with the sad, sad song as Sam traveled farther into the water. He could see something out there, seemingly just out of his reach, and it was a thing of beauty. A soul with hair of gold, surely the fallen creature of heaven singing that song of misery, the tables turned and now reaching out to him.

Above him, as in response to the anguished melody, a brilliant fire erupted in the night sky. It pulsed and twisted and writhed to the lyrics, a long line of blue hues in search of the lost love for whom the song was wrote.

Stupefied at a pain felt so great, from the smallest rock to the highest peak, Sam took his hand in the other's. He looked into the other broken lover's pained face, saw in its eyes a ceaseless—

"Sammy!"

Something struck the side of his face, something disgustingly soft and moist and cool.

Lurching to the left, a series of shudders running up and down his spine, Samuel Winchester was thrust back into the waking world. Looking warily down at his right shoe, at a glob of brown papery stuff trying to eat the white and red leather like it thought itself The Blob, Sam instinctively clawed at the right side of his face – there was a poison on it, a cold poison carried by that Mound of Ick at his feet, being absorbed into his bloodstream to end it all for him within the next three nanoseconds.

On top of trying to squirt its venom into its prey, the Mound of Ick struck Sam's shin. It hurt like a bitch, making him twist around violently in his chair and kick both of his legs. Sam wasn't thinking anymore, simply _reacting_, and the look on his brother's face confused the hell out of him even more than living out the rest of his life brainlessly reacting to the world.

It wasn't a kind of patronizing amusement etched into Dean's features, the movie star sitting up rigidly in his chair on the other side of the table, but…. This was a new one. The fast moving Rolodex in Sam's head, the one filled to the brim with emotional flash cards (all pictures of the eldest Winchester brother's face, all different expressions, all with a different caption on the other side ranging from perturbed to horny), but without a much needed slab of colored, glossy cardboard. It was lost beneath the seat cushions, that card, to be hit on by dust bunnies and Gorilla Glued to a linty lollipop.

The flash card Sam needed, the one which would tell him – "Hey, your buddy's kind of _blank _over here" – and the one residing in its house of lost pocket change chose the finest time to go missing. But by process of elimination it was clear that Dead was…. No, he couldn't be. Something went seriously wrong with that equation somewhere.

Dean Winchester worried? _Worried_, to the point of hundreds of thousands of plowed corn fields across his forehead?

"Goddammit, Sammy, I've only been trying to get your attention for the past ten minutes! Were you having a brain embolism or something over there?"

Click, whir, snap, develop: the new Dean Winchester Worried flash card. He must have started hearing his deathwatch, must have began feeling the icy hand of Death on his shoulder because he simply wasn't the kind of guy to get worried.

The emotion slowly being dismissed from his face, but the sheen in his eyes still there yowling, Dean relaxed a little in his chair. "I was trying to tell you about something I might have found, but you were starting to fade out on me. You've been sitting there staring at that picture with the weirdest look on your face, muttering some mumbo-jumbo kind of chant."

Sam hadn't been aware of speaking, but then again if he had completely detached from the world he wouldn't have been surprised to hear of him doing the Rumba with a coat tree. "Chant?" he repeated, sanity slowly starting to refill the pool of his mind.

Nodding gently, eyes wide, Dean looked like he was trying to persuade an elephant convinced of its pinkness that it most certainly wasn't, pink that is. "Yes, a chant. Something about not harming someone, that you won't let him touch him. Sammy, you're really starting to freak me out here. What's going on?"

As if he expected the Meyerses to start moving again, maybe even come climbing out of the photograph this time, Sam looked back to the open records book and the picture that finally looked as it should: old and worn. Jesus, he really was going insane and didn't need Dean's petty childhood games to help him along anymore.

"Why do you keep looking at the picture like that, Sammy?" Dean asked, his voice strained with concern.

Sam, desperate to think of a decent lie, blurted out the first thing that came to his mind. "The man came to me in one of his victims' houses, Dean, I think I'm allowed to look at his picture in any way I choose."

"You don't need to take that tone with me, Sammy," Dean replied dryly, the worry he was feeling starting to meld with annoyance. "Not after you went on your little astrotrip."

"I'm tired, okay? I must've just dozed off, people do that."

Dean shook his head, the set of his shoulders proof enough that he wasn't buying anything. "You're not like other people. I hate to tell you that, but it's the truth. When _you_ start blacking out in the middle of the day, when _you_ start talking to someone who most definitely isn't me – but if you were, I thank you for calling me a blonde of insurmountable beauty – and when _you_ look at someone's picture with that weird look in your eye… I think it's high time we start being a little freaked out."

"Why do you always feel the need to do this, Dean? I've been sitting here for the past two hours looking through boring and irrelevant information and I zoned out. Don't you tell me that never happens to you while we're on the road, staring at nothing but barley fields for miles in all directions."

"Pardon me, sir, but I don't start acting like a fucking gypsy," Dean whispered harshly.

Sam narrowed his eyes, pressing his palms against his thighs. "I'm fine, Dean. Maybe a little tipsy still from my meeting with the proud Doctor, but fine."

"I don't know what your definition of tipsy is, Sammy, but what just happened now definitely wasn't mine. You're having full-blown episodes, kid. Of what I don't know, but they're episodes all right, and we need to take care of them before you snap and start having drool drip from your mouth and pool on your tee-shirt."

"Then why don't you send me off to the Meyerses' basement for some treatment? You know, trade places. Oh, wait, _I'm sorry_, you want to see if that rat bastard'll be good to his word! Tell me, Dean, what the hell is so important to you to let him cut off your dick and ram it down your throat all because you can't get your head out of the gutter?"

Sam had yelled that last part so loud it had stung his throat, grabbing the unwanted attention of a middle aged woman sitting at a table at the far side of the room. She was behind Dean, Sam easily making out the look on her face: she was downright aghast.

For a while Dean slumped back into his seat, sputtering like a goldfish out of its bowl and looking like one too. It was more than evident that he was angry, let alone embarrassed, but the way his jaw kept opening and closing, opening and closing, made Sam want to laugh in his face and make the situation ten times worse.

"_What?_" clearly wasn't the response Dean had wanted to say, wasn't the knock-him-on-his-ass come back he had been searching for to put Sam in his place. But it was what had come out between his erratic garage door of a mouth and since no one had invented a remote control to turn back and freeze the hands of time, "_What?_" was just going to have to do.

"Don't play coy with me, Deanie baby," Sam spat, waving a hand in the general direction of the Meyers photograph. "What do you want so badly? What can he give you that'll make you _let him kill you_?"

Dean made the universal facial expression, half head shake that symbolized without any need of words that, dude, he's plum flabbergasted.

"I believe what he'll say to you is, 'you'll finally be able to have what you've wished every night of your life to obtain'. Well, do you mind telling me what's so gotdang important to you? Don't forget our little agreement, that whole honesty thing."

Something flashed in Dean's eyes and it wasn't the sheen of worry that had been there some time before. It was either murderous rage – which Sam wouldn't hold him against, not in a few hours' time anyway – or the kind of emotional turmoil that would make him want to crawl under a rock and die. It was the latter and it fueled him down the road of what Sam had been so afraid of back at the motel room after they had gotten back from the Sanderses' home.

"I really hate it when you do this, Sam, when you twist everything around so that no one has to talk about you anymore." Dean's voice was rough, almost shaking.

"I wouldn't have to do that if I could just trust you."

The speed limit was now being broken, they were careening toward the cliff at break-neck speed in a twisted game of chicken.

"Trust. Uh-huh." Dean nodded slowly. "_Trust_, that word from a guy who tried to shoot his own brother in the head."

They each turned their cars at the last minute, neither one of them wanting to go over the edge of the cliff to their doom. But they went to the back up ending, twisting their steering wheels too sharply in the wrong direction. Nose met nose in a violent, fiery caress.

"We're _still_ on this?" Sam asked shrilly. "God, maybe I _should_ have taken those extra bullets from my back pocket, huh? The one my arm was being pulled to, the one Ellicott was screaming to get at. Maybe I _should_ have reloaded that gun and shot you like he wanted me to, that way I wouldn't have had to see you being such a worthless coward."

The sad thing was, out of Sam's anger and frustration he had meant every word, and Dean knew it.

"Yeah, you should have."

Dean rose to his feet, looking everywhere but at his younger brother, and took his jacket from its hanging place of the back of the chair he had been sitting in. Shrugging into it, slamming shut the small book he had been looking through like a five-year-old throwing a tantrum, he cleared his throat once.

"You should have," he repeated.

Sam laughed sourly. "And just where do you think you're going?"

"Away from you. I'll be taking the car and since the vast majority of the money we have I earned, you might want to start thinking about taking up a job here to pay for cab fare."

So this island really was Sam's home (not at all in the way he had anticipated but), it just took a while for his gut to meet up with time.

Dean started to walk away, to the main doors of the record hall, when he stopped and shot his brother a quick chuckle. "Oh, one more thing. While you were orbiting around the moon, I found Meyers's address. It's on page 138, toward the end."

"I would have found it," Sam replied coolly.

"Good, so you won't have any problems working this one alone."

"Not a one."

Dean smiled, an ugly kind of sneer that distorted his features into one big, meaty lump. Behind it, though, just far enough into the shadows for Sam to be blind to was the vision of Dean's throbbing pain. And forebodingly, as he walked from the room with boot heels thumping, his kid brother finally noticed that the deathwatch had stopped ticking.

"_This might sting a little, boy."_

And was he ever right.


	12. Twelve

**Chapter Twelve ; No Way Around It**

The phone was sitting right there, burning a hole in his pocket and scorching the flesh off his leg – but he supposed that was better than his ass; thank God for small favors and cell phone pockets. It was right there, _right there_. All Sam had to do was take it out, press a number on speed dial and wait for the connection to be made. How hard could it possibly be, to enigmatically say "I saved your hide, man, the least you can do is thank me for it", to tell Dean he'd meet him wherever it was that Dean was going. Not that hard at all, but getting around the insults made might be a harder job.

Risk, though, that was the neon sign flashing before his eyes. There was too much of a risk if Sam called Dean and said all the things needed to be said: mainly, the possibility of Dean coming back. As long as that rock-and-roll time warped blonde stayed far, far away from Never Never Land the chances of a run in with a rabid Peter Pan were slim to none.

But the deathwatch stopped, didn't it? Somewhere between goldfish charades and a walk out of the main records room that deathwatch stopped, stopped dead and plunged the world into an all too eerie silence. What did that mean? Was Dean saved or was he even more pegged for an early death than ever before? Would he be lasting another year or find himself at the pearly gates a few decades sooner than planned?

The deathwatch stopped, but what the hell did that mean? Hopefully not that the tie binding the Winchester brothers together had finally been severed, destroyed to the point where Sam wouldn't be able to hear a time bomb go off – a time bomb that might be ticking faster than anytime before.

Crap. Why'd Sam get the bright idea to switch to autopilot? If Dean was doomed no matter what, if he was destined to be struck by a train and that train was coming for him tracks or no (if it had to veer off course just a little and come crashing through the picture window into the living room or do a u-turn for the nearest bar) come hell or high water it was going to happen. So what if plucking Dean off those tracks and sticking him in the middle of a mall twenty miles from any set of train rails wasn't going to do any good?

Mr. Cocky was in his car by now, having driven to the motel room to gather up his things and maybe leave a nasty note tacked to the pillow case behind for Sam, but what if he wasn't speeding _away_ from danger but right into its mouth? What if by shooting Dean in the leg Sam had only made things a whole lot worse? What if he had single handedly flipped to the last page of the book, deciding that the entire middle section of the story wasn't worth reading – just get to the good part, see what happens, who lives and who dies.

Well, there was that fate talk again. Books, trains, the mouth of danger with its rotting teeth and foul breath. And if there really was such a thing as fate, Sam had certainly never prodded at it before.

He had dreamt of Dean's death, of his big brother tied down to an old surgical gurney and essentially giving up the biggest boxing match in the history of the earth. If he dreamt it, that meant it had to play itself out – but Sam had driven his brother away, in the opposite direction of a madman and his basement butcher shop. Holy jeez. What if he opened up a can of worms so big the aftershocks of the outpouring creepy-crawlies would split the world down the middle?

Sam's face twisted into a severe wince.

What had he just done? His brother was suppose to die, but he had manipulated the cards because he loved the guy and did not want that death to happen. Sam had messed with what bigger game board there might have been out there (somewhere, anywhere) and what would the repercussions of that action be? The very fabric of time and space might unravel, catapulting the world into another dark age with its signature black death being a plague of panic and disorder. Barbarianism at its finest, that's what was going to happen to the world because of what Sam had done.

He banged his forehead against the stack of papers in front of him, the musty smell of old age invading his sinuses. This is what Dean must have felt like during school, coming face-to-face with a pop quiz.

Back to Dean again, the kid no longer chained to Death but driving around on roads that would soon crumble below his tires, sizing up women who would fall through the cracks and staring up at a sky that would melt away into fire.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Sam saved the brother he loved, but the world might implode because of it.

He should have just said nothing, should have just sat there and let his brother think him a bit crazy. He should have gone with Dean to Meyers's basement, should have found and killed the sonofawhore when he went after Dean. He should have _not_ toyed with the space-time continuum, definitely not. Not, not, not.

Time to call his brother and warn him about the funny strange things about to be afoot. Give him a head's up about the cats with three tails and trees with fins.

Lifting his head up from the record books with a heaving sigh, Sam reached into the smoldering pants pocket that held his cell phone. He pressed the appropriate key for reaching his brother and bobbed his head back and forth

_("Two little monkeys sittin' in a tree, one is blind and the other can't see.")_

with the dial tone as he waited for Dean to (a) shut off his cell phone and bring Sam to leave a voice mail never to be listened to or (b) to get sick of hearing the ring, ring, ringing of the phone and pick up just to tell Sam to cease and desist. So far neither happened and

_("All day long they throw their coconuts down,")_

Sam was reduced to continue on passing the time with a silly song he always used to sing when he was bored. In this case he was nervous, wondering if Dean was sitting in that Chevy with a smile on his face, knowing that his brother was being driven insane with the incessant dial tone. At least get a decent ring tone, Sam thought bitterly, along with other things like: maybe he can't pick up the phone because Meyers got to him the moment I wasn't looking. That was irrational, though, being as how Meyers could only hack at people's organs when they were asleep

_("I know because one hit me on the crown.")_

and convinced that a ghost wielding psycho tools with the density of air could actually hurt them. So for the moment Dean wasn't being the subject of exploratory surgery, wasn't being tethered to a table forced to look at pictures of suggestive women (most if not all disemboweled) and have his… member coated with an ugly nasty acid if an unwanted reaction happened (which most often did, the patients being bombarded with sexual stimuli on top of seeing those poor mutilated women – they couldn't control themselves, really) – but the least he could do was answer the damned phone.

Apparently Dean was still sore. When Sam got through the whole song, began rewinding it in his head without his brother answering the phone – just the voice mail kicking in – he gave it up as a bad job and hung up. Leaving a message was dumb, it would just be erased and if it wasn't surely when Dean heard "Watch out for zebra's with purple stripes" he would not only think Sam horrendously off but a drug addict as well.

But loopy drug addicts could still perform investigations, could still turn to page 138 and find out where they needed to be in order to light up the bad guy like a Christmas tree and send him packing.

&&&

When he left the building the cold island air seemed to be like shrink wrap pressed onto his face, making his skin so tight it was a wonder it didn't tear right in half. His face might not have cracked and fallen off, but the feeling of having plastic over his head made Dean uneasy. He couldn't breathe.

It was all psychological, of course, that notion of trying to get air in a vacuum chamber, but his body didn't want to believe that. There was no oxygen, none what so ever, and if he didn't get to the car soon the pavement would have a crash course in Dean Winchester 101.

Fumbling around like a blind man, Dean reached his baby and opened up the driver's door, practically throwing himself into the car and pulling the door closed behind him. As soon as the door was shut, all the windows up like the car was more of a hermetically sealed bubble than an automobile, Dean started breathing in explosive gasps. Panicky, shamed gasps for air that had never tasted sweeter.

He had been drowning, that's what tripped his mind into panic mode, and only now did his head breach the surface of the water. Powerless, that what he had felt like, simply thrashing around beneath the glass top of the ocean with a force one hundred times bigger than he was holding his head down. That force, the one with hands the size of a small country, had been the undeniable truth Sam had wanted him to admit to.

Frankenstein's monster would have done better around a forest fire than Dean reacting to and dealing with things inside the record hall. Shock could do some pretty crazy things to you if you weren't careful and Dean hadn't been. He had been able to not let it slip, to have one of those boughts of rage in which you let _everything_ out along with the insults, but he had let Sammy read too much into him… hadn't he? Hadn't he written it all over his face for his little brother to read, the little brother who by all rights shouldn't have been poking around his head like that?

How did he know, anyway? How did that little punk know what to ask and how to go about asking it?

What the hell had gotten into him, that's all Dean had wanted to know and then that had to happen. The atomic bomb to end all atomic bombs, with a mushroom cloud that would be in the air until the next ice age – and well beyond, most likely. He could feel it in his lungs, the acrid smoke and radiation from that cloud, and with each exhalation he could see the word DOOMSDAY written out in the little fog puffs spread onto the window.

Pulsing and glowing red like blood, the word hammered into Dean's cold forehead as it rested on the driver's side window. First it was like a beating heart and then seemed to roll over, twist itself into a rapid _ticka-ticka-ticka_ march. It was a mocking sound, relentlessly reminding Dean of all those nights and hours wasted lying wide awake under the bed clothes ("Feign asleep for Sammy, he doesn't need another thing to worry about" he had told himself) and flicking gold coins into the wishing well, eventually giving that up to make his diseased rubber band ball to throw into it with a cannon of an arm.

_Ticka-ticka-ticka_.

Sammy found out, somehow.

_Ticka-ticka-ticka._

But he doesn't really _know_, not yet anyway and I won't be the one to tell him. I won't be the one to tell him how he's right, how I really would let everything go if I could just have _It_. Maybe I'm the one who needs to have some CAT scans, huh?

_Ticka-ticka-ticka._

And the radiation poisoning is already settling in, has been for a while now. If I can't trust Sammy and Sammy can't trust me, we're both screwed this side of Sunday. But I just can't let him know, not when It is such a small thing in his eyes. Here we go, bringing on the Apocalypse over a silly wish to be genuinely loved.

_Ticka-ticka-ticka._

Dean must have sat in that car for a good half hour, thinking about how pathetically fragile his relationship was with his Sammy. His phone rang some time into the pity party, but he didn't answer it. He already knew who it was and how the conversation would go: if one of them didn't start off with the "Yeah, I forgot to tell you this back there, asshole" line then they'd be walking on eggshells until one of them stepped down too hard.

With that in mind, how he was positive if he _had_ answered the call the first thing he would have said was, "You need me _already_? I should have known. You couldn't even piss by yourself until you were twenty" out of sheer humiliation, Dean started up his Impala and drove to the Driftwood Motel. Once there he gathered up what few things he carried around with him on his travels and stood there, at the base of Sam's bed, and stared at the straightened comforter until he turned old and grey.

He didn't know where'd he go or how long he'd stay there, but he told the otherwise empty room that he'd "come back when the pot of water starts boiling". That was one of his mother's sayings, sparked by what Sam had said about DAMIRCOBS. Whenever Little Person Dean had been upset about something, mainly about what so-and-so did or said she'd tell him to leave some space to breathe, but to make sure to come back when the water pot started boiling. That pot, she'd say, was a very large one and it was filled to the top with water, but eventually it would come to a boil and when eventually came… "get a whole bunch of rags to clean up the mess".

Dean had never understood that mantra, not once in his twenty-seven years, until just then. He would leave, drive around Maine for a while until he felt calm enough to not sock Sam in the jaw if he ever saw him again, and then he'd come back. Hopefully in time to shove his boot up Jonathan Meyers's ass, but he wasn't going to rush anything.

Still more ashamed of himself than angry at Sam (thought he was, oh Lordy was he ever), Dean unfolded a roll of bills and shoved it in one of his brother's socks. Even the grass knew the kid was too awkward to grab a job – let alone find a decent romp in one of these small island towns. He also left a note, torn from a sheet of scrap paper (actually, it was a Fat Little Notebook page a girl five states ago had written her phone number on and gave to him giggling to no end) and tried to write something witty on the side of the page without an area code on it.

Nothing came.

Leaving it blank, figuring that his Sammy was smart enough to realize that the message was – in a dude-ly way, of course – "you're more important to me than some strange chick's number… but I wrote it on my hand, don't worry" Dean walked out into the early winter afternoon to wage another battle with plastic wrap.

Dean was his father's son all right, that's what the _ticka-ticka-ticka_ greeted him with when the rushing blood in his ears died down enough to let him hear again.


	13. Thirteen

**Chapter Thirteen ; A Black Veil**

Completely upon chance, as Sam started walking around to the other side of the island toward what might or might not be left of the Meyerses' home, he passed by the local church and seemed to have been carried into it by the tide of people from the street crashing in through the front doors.

Certainly it wasn't a church service, not this far into the day, and so Sam didn't fight the many bodies pushing him up through the long line of pews. He waited for a break in the wave, one small enough for him to squeeze through without getting himself trampled to death, and found himself an inconspicuous place to sit in the back of the room, behind a young woman with the bill of her Boston Bruins cap raised high so she could easily look up without having to move her entire head.

With the island still draining into the church, Sam looked around the small building as casually as he could. The nave was a booming echo of anxiety, the air – though heavy with incense – was even heavier with fear. Because of that fear, most of the residents of Arrowsic Island who came into the church stopped at the font, as if it would calm their nerves, before settling themselves into the pews (first crossing themselves, something Sam had astoundingly remembered to do) and talking feverishly with the others around them.

Though the Bruins fan blocked most of Sam's view, as he sat there slouching and badly trying to move into the wall by the act of osmosis, he was pretty sure of the fact that the person who ran the show around this island was standing between the choir screens at the high altar. There wasn't enough light in the seasonably dreary day to paint his or her skin all the colors of the imagination, but the immense stain glass windows would undoubtedly awash her (or him) in something much more important in their mind: power.

By the static charging the air, making it absolutely alive and twitching with an almost visible shade of panic, Sam knew that power was what the islanders needed at the moment. Power to ease their minds, power to rectify a bad situation, and power to keep the goings on inside the church silent to the world outside of the wood siding and religious scened windows.

To Sam he wouldn't have been shocked at all to find out that he'd stumbled into another world entirely, that was what the place felt like. Somehow, someway unbeknownced to him, Sam had put on one of the Magician's rings and was sent to the land of puddles. He must have slipped, fallen into the one closest to him, and that was all she wrote. He wasn't in Narnia, but this definitely wasn't the Arrowsic Island of passerby either.

This was a new and strange land, one abuzz with anger and fright, one Sam shouldn't have come into. But like a child having just discovered something new and wondrous, he couldn't look away even if he wanted to, for the king of this hidden land had just rapped on the large Bible kept on the stand at the high altar.

"Have we all settled ourselves?" a man bellowed, and Sam would have bet his old apartment that this rich baritone (natural or brought out by the tall nave and stained glass) had once been a choir boy here, had once sung in one of those very choir stalls.

A woman with an aging voice from somewhere to Sam's left spoke up loudly, words sailing above the quieting murmur of curiosity around her. "_Settled_?How can we possibly be _settled_?"

The murmur quickly became a roar of agreement that made Sam's bowels vibrate along with the pews. The man next to him, looking old enough to have seen the birth of the sun, stomped his foot on the ground.

"I must agree with you, Eliza," the king responded. "These are hard times and seem to have not any sign of getting easier that we might see, but I simply asked if everyone has found a seat and that the doors have been closed so that no reporter might come in."

Another world, no way to deny it.

The woman in the Bruins cap turned her head to look back at the doors, a fierce look in her eyes that the cheery pink of her cap couldn't disguise. They landed on Sam, an impossible green that seemed to burn with an emotion he hadn't wanted to know could possibly exist.

He smiled softly at her, tipping his head as a Texan gentleman might do around a southern belle. When the Bruins fan turned back around, Sam shut his eyes in relief. This new world was ugly and he didn't like it.

The king, from his thrown upon the high altar of the modest church, might have swelled to an impossible size. "Good, good. Now, let us bring ourselves to what we all have come here for." He could have pounded his fist on the Bible below his hands again, the sound hollow and ominous. "We have congregated here for a long time now, my friends, but have found no answers. I ask you, have we not been looking for them hard enough?"

Another bell curve of sound, this one laced with bitter confusion and – if Sam dissected it correctly – spite.

"We have not, my friends, we have not at all. Our children are still being taken from us, our wives and husbands, our brothers and sisters," the king reminded all of his people. "What does that say about us, friends, what does that tell you?"

Sam didn't really care, all he wanted was for this guy to come to the point before the torches and pitch forks were handed out.

The old man beside him mentioned penance in a voice that brought to Sam images of sawdust, several other people threw it up into the air as well in voices ranging from honey to velvet smoke. At the high altar the king must have thought the same thing, for he said something that made this new world slip further down the ladder.

"Penance, yes, my friends! We have sinned, just like all men, but we have been chosen to be put through this course of righteousness. But now I must ask you, also, friends, if this is not the work of some darker force, of something that has once been banned from our land but has reentered it long ago under our very noses?"

Sam raised his head, knowing full well that this king was speaking of the whole Satan bit, but sat up straighter because _maybe_. Oh, _maybe._

More talking again, this time hushed and like small ripples in a filled bathtub. It was what that bathtub was filled with that made Sam wonder, made him hope.

"Friends, we have talked about this many a time before. You all know very well what I mean."

Well, not _all_, but at the pit of Sam's stomach he might have been happy with a bent answer. Since he had come out of the puddle he had fallen into, entered this world like the magician's nephew had once done with others, it had only been painted over with darker colors every few minutes. It was like Rembrandt had been unhappy with the first set of colors, wanted the picture darker, darker, darker...

"The sinners are being taken from us, my friends, sent to their judgment day, but are we not still here? Have we not been left to come here and wonder who it is that is doing this to us, wonder if this is not a curse but a _blessing_?"

It was gnawing away at Sam, something he should have known from the moment he sat down, something he should have felt and been able to recognize, but what?

"A blessing?" a women shrieked, this one up ahead of Sam.

There was a pause, maybe meaning the king was nodding or crossing himself or simply rolling his eyes while slapping the heel of his hand against his forehead. When he started speaking again, his voice was as strong as ever.

"I know," he said loudly, voice bouncing from the arches to the ceiling to the people huddled in the pews. "I know it is a ghastly thing to think of, and I am shamed to have mentioned it–"

But was he really?

"–yet you must remember this, my friends, that our young ones who have committed all of these atrocious sins have gone into the bright light. They have been cured of what has been..."

The king's voice began to fade away as the horror of the moment sunk deeper into Sam. It seemed to rot him away as it traveled farther and farther into him, twisting about and then coming back out of him to finish the job.

Sam rose to his feet, his knees hitting the small container holding an old, worn Bible, and was able to see more clearly the world into which he had fallen into. Over the heads of the islanders his eyes went, over the people who were only frightening because they were so desperate for answers, and to the high alter.

He couldn't see the king, not through the choir screens, but he could _see_ the evil resonating out of it from between them. A swirling, dark mist floated through the air and appeared to be carried up to the top of the nave by what wind there might have been, the slight breeze that spread the scent of incense and made the votive candles flicker.

But the mist didn't go all the way to the ceiling, didn't pass through it and wasn't caught up in the extravagant wood molding there was up there. The evil coming out from the high alter, in its form of charcoal mist, separated high in the nave and came raining down – slowly, as if someone at the switch board hit the wrong button and slowed all the action down to a snail's pace.

_("You might want to make friends with the snails then, buddy, because we might be here for a while.")_

A very long while. How does one escape from hell, exactly? And if this really was hell, the baritone in the high altar surely was the freaking ring leader.

Sammy, so caught up in watching the dark mist sprinkle down onto the heads of the unsuspecting islanders – all ten of them, dude, with their secrets and suspicious glances – he didn't once excuse himself as he walked out from his pew and into the middle of the nave. The woman in her pink, adjustable Bruins cap had her eyes on Sam again, he could feel that, but at the moment all he was worried about was who that drifting near black mist belonged to.

"What is it, son?"

The king seemed to be bigger than ever, his voice higher than the sky, and it chilled Sam to the bone.

With every last living resident of Arrowsic Island watching him, Samuel Winchester lowered his head from the fancy and labor intensive décor on the ceiling and tried to prepare himself for what was waiting for him beyond the choir screens. He didn't want to have to take his attention away from the evil mist, but Sam knew he had to.

The man standing behind the Bible stand, either one of his hands on the edges of the wide pale oak book holder, was smiling a decayed smile that made his third degree acne scars look more like thousands of gaping mouths, hungry for the flesh of the innocent.

Meyers winked once at Sam and snapped out of existence – along with the mist, right before some of it could manage to touch the kid's hair – just before Winchester might have screamed.

It was as if someone had turned on the spotlights, the church suddenly so bright it hurt Sam's eyes. Squinting, he looked at the man who had replaced Jonathan Meyers nutso MD, literally in the blink of an eye.

He was a proud looking black man, with a warm face and even warmer smile.

"If I've upset you with my words, son, I do apologize. You haven't been to one our meetings before have you?"

Sam said nothing, he was so far beyond stunned to even remember how to breathe.

The man's smile didn't falter as he nodded gently at Sam.

"Well, son, I'm afraid you've gotten your first taste at what goes on in here. Again, I feel gravely ill for offending you."

Sam smiled at whoever it was that man should be called, but it looked more like the facial expression a guy who had too much to drink makes before vomiting all over himself. "No harm done," he said meekly and high tailed it out of the building before Gweneth Weiss realized who he was.

&&&

Sam felt like he needed to hit something. Just walk up to the closest thing to him and let it all out, punch and kick and snarl until he simply couldn't anymore because, Houston, he had a problem. A very big problem indeed.

The Meyerses' home, which had been built on the far side of Arrowsic Island at the precise location Sam had gone to – not an inch further to the left or right, not high or lower than his tennis shoes – hadn't been where it was suppose to be.

After the incident in the church, Sam had practically broken into a run all the way to the other side of the island. He had carried the piece of notebook paper he had written the address on and must have looked at the thing two hundred times, standing on the house's former site like an idiot.

The entire house must have been lit up like a candle for the Georgetown fire department to practice on or maybe leveled for the sake of leveling. All that was left of the Meyerses' home when Sam had gotten there was a large plot of green grass and in the middle of it what appeared to be a black granite gravestone. By the closer look of it, though, with the vibrant and meticulously trimmed rose bush on three of its sides it was a memorial. If it was a memorial, Sam had concluded, that probably meant that not only was the house kaput the basement had been filled in with earth.

"Fucking Christ," Sam had muttered. "You bastard. You _fucking_ bastard, I bet you're so amused by this. Aren't you, you little tyrant? That act in the church and now this? I bet your side is just splitting!"

The land had sloped upward, framed by trees on either side that led up to the cliff. From where Sam had stood, looking past the monument to the doctor's victims, he had seen the dark green grass slice off into bright grey sky. Beyond the trees, aiding as a kind of bumper system to draw the eye to the drop off, had been mounds of dark grey and black rocks, jagged until the tide line hit and then everything was worn smooth.

"And I bet the townspeople dug up your body and burned it, didn't they? That's why everyone's so hush-hush about you, they figure that if no one can find your filthy corpse the better off the island'll be. But you showed them, didn't you? _You showed them_."

A cloud had passed over the sun, shrouding everything in an even muskier grey that had brought back visions of the mist in the nave of Arrowsic Island's local and only church. The cold wind had seemed to pick up in stronger gusts, slicing through Sam like he had been nothing more than cheese cloth.

"I'm going to get you, do you hear me? Body or not I'm going to get you!" Sam had screamed into the wind, the words hardly getting anywhere at all before they had been shoved back into his face. He had made that promise to not only mad Doctor Meyers, but to the world, to his brother – somewhere out there with no idea that he had escaped the jaws of death.

Now Sam was back in his Driftwood Motel room, dressed down to his traditional night clothes and all ready for a (don't kid yourself) good night's sleep. He was sitting on the edge of his mattress, facing the twice locked door and Dean's empty bed.

Currently the only two things that Sam had found to let someone, anyone in on the fact that "Dean Winchester was here" were his smell and the note he had left behind for Sam, sitting there between the two pillows so forlornly.

Sam picked up the message tentatively, a thought popping into his mind that the piece of paper must have been soaked in some kid of virus that would bring about something from a Stephen King novel. When no handsome form of Satan came up to him and tried to drag him off to the Archangel's army with the promise of power, wealth, so on and so forth (not to mention blah blah blah as King would say) another thought glowed like a flame in a dark room: what the --- ?

The was nothing written on it but some foggy, backward numbers that happened to be, when Sam flipped the tiny sheet of paper over, Carlie's cell phone number. Who was Carlie and why Dean had left her number on Sam's bed was so far beyond him it hurt like a pesky splinter. He didn't get any bad vibes from it, though – maybe an overpowering stench of women's perfume, but no ugly sensations at all – and was confident in the fact that it wasn't a death threat.

Setting the reeking note on the nightstand, Sam laid himself down on the bed. Exhausted and confused, pained by the day's events and angry, it didn't take long for him to fall asleep. His eyes like ten pound paperweights, he drifted off to dreamland almost as soon as he shut those heavy, glossy hunks of glass.

He completely missed the doctor standing in the corner of the room, his blood-stained surgical garbs hanging like over starched table cloths on his small frame.


	14. Fourteen

**Chapter Fourteen ; The Reign of Agony **

When Sam didn't find himself magically transported back in time to his Stanford, California apartment building on November 22, 2005 he thought that the gears of time travel had gotten a little rusty, that it would be taking a few extra seconds to get him there. When Sam didn't fall back onto he and Jessica's bed, listening to the beating drum of the shower going at full blast he assumed that he was walking slower than usual and would at any moment decide to plop down on the bed with a smirk on his face and a pleasant sigh. But when Sam didn't feel any blood droplets fall onto his cheek, when he didn't open his eyes to find Jess plastered to the ceiling with that clearly dead deer-in-headlights look to her face, and when he didn't watch her erupt into flame above his head… well, that's when he started to get a little anxious.

The chances of him having a new dream were slimmer than Lara Flynn Boyle in that pink tutu at the Golden Globes. He might be having that most welcomed change, sure, but Sam highly doubted it. If he was suddenly going to be playing a lively game of soccer with David Beckham, he certainly wouldn't be doing it with his eyes closed and unable to move.

Maybe because he had screwed with time, with the powers of fate that might or might not be real, Sam was stuck in a waiting station between bed and dream, dream and bed. It was a subway strike, and Sam was not only left holding the ball but stuck in his usual cab halfway between there past and there future. Oh, how peachy.

Opening one eye and then the other, with the intention of talking with his other subway passengers about what was going on – bitch and moan at the driver if there were no other commuters – Sam found himself more confused than he'd been when he was awake and looking over Dean's joke of a note.

Empty room. Concrete walls. Concrete floor. Some kind of slimy substance all over said walls and floor that looked far too much like ectoplasm for even the remotest sense of comfort. One moldy looking door straight across from him.

Sam had seen this room once before, had been here in one of his annoyingly (not to neglect terrifyingly) accurate preminissions. He felt bile rise up to the back of his mouth, along with the realization that he might be in store for another one.

"I get no breaks, _no breaks_," he thought sourly. "Who do I get to see die tonight?"

A noise burst into life from somewhere off to Sam's left, a kind of stunted shuffling that came progressively nearer until the little Winchester boy was able to see decently enough who or what was making that racket.

It was none other than Jonathan Meyers himself, carrying with him a decreped wooden chair slung through his left forearm. Somehow Sam wasn't all that surprised.

He watched as Meyers – who was so short he had to lean very far to the right in order to keep the chair legs from snagging on the ground and in effect shoot the doctor forward like a pint-sized rocket – weaved like a drunkard over to a favorable spot of floor in front of Sam.

"Oh, I'm sure it'll be very much a surprise to you, Samuel," Meyers said calmly. He plunked the chair down so that it faced Sam, but didn't yet sit down in it.

&&&

Dean had not recieved nearly enough courage to drive any farther than the Rainbow Brite infected gas station. He was pondering whether or not the caloric intake of a Twinkie would be worth it, if he'd be charmed by the notion of having some extra ass cushioning, when he unintentionally dropped the greasy log of joy and reached out to the whirling candy display in front of him.

There was no rosy guarantee that without the white plastic covered metal stand Dean would be able to keep on his feet, more likely he'd meet the dingy linoleum floor with his face than stand upright straighter than the barrel of a shotgun. If he couldn't see past the roaring beast of white hot pain running around behind his eyes, there was no way in hell he'd be able to last three seconds without collapsing.

Dean knew this feeling, but more on an informal basis; kind of like talking daily to the guy at the magazine stand without ever having the story of his life in your back pocket. This feeling, however, wasn't the type to beam a wrinkly smile, wave and ask, "Ha ya do-in?" in a thick New York accent. It was more likely to take a lead pipe to the back of your head. It was the kind of thing that, during the few times it decided to stop by, it wanted to make its presence known. This latest visit made three "Hey, remember me?" meetings.

The first time he had been playing with a box of Legos in his bedroom – the actual box, not the colorful plastic bricks. He had been just about ready to land on Pluto and battle the space aliens there with his ray gun when an evil little man had clawed his way out of the five-year-old Dean's abdomen. That had been the night his mother had incinerated above Sammy's bed, terrifying the baby and coming close to giving him a nasty heat burn.

The second time he had been scavenging through his old box of cassette tapes, trying to choose which Black Sabbath tape to listen to, when he doubled so far over in pain he had smacked his head against the dash of the Impala. That evil man had come back, grown because Dean had done so as well. That had been the night Jessica died, the night Sam was so pummeled by loss and disbelief he might have been cremated along with her if Dean hadn't gotten there in time.

But this time the pain was worse by far, surpassing the last two harrowing events even when combined. It was intense enough to bring Dean within an inch of passing out, of filling him with a want to dig into his body with his own fingers and rip that prick of a man out of there for good, of bringing him to the sad stage of ending himself because certainly if he didn't the pain would kill him anyway.

As the pain seemed to all but die down, as Rainbow Brite got bit in the neck by empathy and came rushing over to Dean to see "what's the matter with you, Cracker Jack?", and as gravity seemed to up in strength and send him toppling to the floor – smashing the Twinkie to a pulp – Dean didn't want to have to face what the monsters burrowing out from every last millimeter of his body were telling him.

His Sammy was locked in a trunk with holes drilled into the sides, thrown over the pier to sink to the bottom of the harbor. Sammy was holding his breath again, only this time not because he wanted to, this time the kid _had_ to. And Dean might as well have been on the other side of the world.

&&&

Meyers seemed to be bursting at the seams with happiness. He didn't show it on him yet, still stood beside his rotting chair with a possible conviction that he'd break the thing if he sat down in it, but Sam could sense the emotion pulsing through the Chihuahua of a mad doctor.

Though he knew from the word go that his meddling with time and space had caused him to be slightly paralyzed in his dreams, Sam hooked an eyebrow and made to act like he was dumber than a post.

"Stealing some of our patients medications, are we?"

The doctor clapped his hands, rubbed them together. "No, son, just excited."

"If you don't mind my asking, excited about what?"

Meyers jumped once on his toes. "Oh, you'll find out soon enough, my boy."

"I only play these kind of games with my brother, Meyers, so if you'll just cut the–"

"Curmudgeon, yes?" Meyers leaned toward his company, though his feet didn't move an inch in any direction. "To tell you the truth, Samuel, I was quite shocked to learned that your brother even knew that word. Every now and again he seems to have a flicker of intelligence in him, but then–" he clapped his hands again, louder this time "–it's gone. Must be very frustrating for you."

Sam said nothing, tossed over in his mind how long Meyers had been tailing his brother when the doctor started to speak again.

"I know with my wife, sometimes I want to scream. I love the girl dearly, you know, but her accent is so thick. I imagine that must be what it's like for you, only in Emily's position. You stand there for ten minutes, trying to tell your brother were the Thorozine is but it just doesn't get through his skull. Your intelligence, my boy, is much like Emily's Germanic accent. It's so dense, you might as well resort to keeping your mouth shut and conversing through the children's picture cards that teach them a new word."

"My brother understands me just fine, Meyers."

He stomped his foot, pointed at Sam with a wide smile. "Oh, of course he does, Samuel! Because you don't tell him much more than a hare tells a fox where it lives." The man's grin said it all: the hare will give the fox a false address, but the wolf watching from a nearby thicket will follow the hare to its real home and have a ten course meal.

It hit Sam like a grand piano. Standing there – yet leaning back far enough to make his neck strain from having to hold his head up to see somewhat normally – he had the epiphany that should have hit him a couple of hours earlier.

The dream in which Dean was about to become Meyers's next guinea pig had never led to blood. It had been interrupted by the Doc's comment about hurrying up, tick tock, much like a missing scene in a movie reel. Sam had never actually _seen_ his brother die, just kind of assumed it and went on from there.

But it hadn't been Dean who was meant to die on that gurney, not ever. It had been Sam. All along, right from the get-go, it had been Sam.

The dream he had had been the nice, juicy steak in the bear trap. Meyers had planted the seed in Sam's mind to lure him to the most dismal act in the play. He had known that the minute Sam had that dream he would have thought it another one of his preminisions. He had known that it would snow on the mountains of hell before Sam let this one slide, ignored it like he had done with Jessica. That bastard had _known_ Sam would devise a way to get Dean away from Arrowsic Island, leaving Samuel Winchester helpless with an oozing wound in front of a very hungry cougar.

&&&

Rainbow Brite, every strand of her hair now an electric blue, hadn't gotten the answer she wanted. She didn't get any, actually, just a series of hissing grunts as Dean had struggled to his feet. Though it was obvious Cracker Jack had other, more important things weighing on his mind, Gweneth Weiss's granddaughter had thrown question after question at him anyway.

"Do I need to call an ambulance?", "Is it your heart, your liver, your prostate gland?" (that one had gotten very close to getting a _"what the – my _prostate_? I'm only twenty-seven!"_ look), "If you're going to die, could you do it outside in the parking lot? I just washed the floor", "Can you talk? Because if you can it would be nice to be able to tell the 9-1-1 operator what's wrong with you", and Dean's favorite: "You're going to pay for the Twinkie, right?"

He did pay for that Twinkie, telling himself through the finally subsiding pain (though it was still there like a nail through the eye) that he'd deal with the yellow and white gunk on his back some other time, and stumbled out of the mini-mart doors like the hunchback of Notre Dame.

Somehow he managed to make it into Georgetown without killing anything, had been able to speed to the Driftwood Motel without wrapping the Impala around a street lamp.

Making another mental note to thank his lucky starts sometime in the future along with cleaning off his jacket, Dean ran to his brother's motel room without being consciously aware that his legs were even pumping like well oiled pistons. He skidded to a stop in front of the appropriate door and, not wanting to waste any time in opening it the traditional way, Dean simply kicked the damned thing in. He plowed into the room, half delirious from the pain shooting all the way to his fingertips, and felt the floor blink out beneath his feet.

Sammy was lying on the bed, asleep, when by every rule in the book of a man prone to early waking by nightmares and strange noises, Dean's little brother should have shot out of bed at the sound of the door breaking open like a cannon – with steely, suspicious eyes and dagger poised and ready.

"SAM?"

&&&

"Congratulations, Samuel, you've figured out the Rubik's Cube." Meyers smiled, finally settling himself into the chair in front of the up-tilted gurney his patient was strapped to. "Your father would be proud."

"This isn't real," Sam said forcefully. "I'm dreaming all of this, all of it, and it's not real."

Meyers was no longer able to keep the giddiness he was feeling away from his face. "You'll think otherwise soon enough, what with that pliable mind of yours, and when you do…. Say hello to your gal Jessica for me."

Sam had enough slack in his binds to slam his fist against the gurney. "Don't you mention her, don't you _dare_ mention her."

"Touchy, aren't we?" Meyers's smile was starchy now, but otherwise he was still gayer than a rainbow. "My apologies, Samuel. I will keep your lady friend out of this."

Losing his cool, well, wasn't. Sam needed to remain calm throughout this whole appointment with the devil because if he didn't something bad might happen. If he got himself too worked up, his brain might start reconsidering the dream factor in all of this.

"Thank you," Sam replied politely. He willed his muscles to relax, became like mush in leather straps.

Meyers was starting to realize how tough an egg Sam was going to be to crack – unless he already knew, which the gleam in his black eyes said far too clearly. "I suppose you aren't wondering why you're here and not your ragamuffin brother?"

"You'd be correct."

The doctor's smile gained new life. "But you're lying, Samuel, and it's not very polite to lie. All you've been doing for the past three minutes now is ask why over and over again. Really, it's quite annoying. If you don't mind stopping, I'm getting a pounding headache."

"_SAM?"_

Those words seemed to rattle the very foundation of the world. Everything seemed to shake, to ring like church bells. There was a lengthy pause before the voice acted up again, just as rich in emotion as before.

"_Sammy! Fuck, I knew I shouldn't have left. Sam!"_

An uncontrollable reaction to hearing his brother, Sam savagely tugged and pulled at his binds, looking up at the ceiling and around at all the walls. "DEAN!"

Meyers laughed. "Really, now, Samuel, don't be silly. Your brother can't hear you. To him you're like Sleeping Beauty, forever to rest until the handsome prince comes bouncing along on his valiant steed."

"Then why's he yelling at me to wake up if he thinks I'm just taking a nap?"

"And why _can't_ you wake up? First, you're already starting to bleed there – your nail is bend back from when you were struggling. Dean is quite observant for a man obsessed with women, I'll give him that."

But in truth, Meyers didn't know what made Dean come charging back into the picture. He was well aware of how special Sam was, but Dean was nothing more or less than a fool. There was nothing in the boy's head other than a few scraps of lint and a piece of string, so what made him come back?

"Secondly, you can't wake up because your brain thinks that you're already awake."

Sam shook his head, but it was getting hard to deny how real everything appeared to be. "No, I'm dreaming. I'll wake up. Dean'll wake me up, toss me in a cold shower or someth–"

"Samuel, it is not wise for your brother to wake you while you stand there positive that you're already risen. I've had it happen once, dear boy. You'll go daft, have to be put into a home and be lost to your brother forever. Lose, lose situation as they say."

"You're bluffing. I've had night terrors before, would have bet my life that I was awake, but…."

Doc's face couldn't hold his grin. "_But_?"

Closing his eyes, Sam pressed his head against the gurney.

"Yes, Samuel. Unless you wake yourself, just like you've done with those other night terrors – and I'm afraid there is no category for what you're in right this moment – you'll be walking through concrete for the rest of your life."


	15. Fifteen

**Chapter Fifteen ; Never Coming Home **

Dean didn't bother with closing the door, making sure that a vast amount of attention was drawn away from room twelve and not to it. On any other day he would have, but not with his little brother lying there on that bed with such a troubled look on his face.

Running over to the farthest bed, to his brother who other than that bothered expression seemed utterly paralyzed, Dean lunged himself onto the ocean blue clothed mattress. Planting his knees on either side on his brother's thighs, forgoing any thoughts revolving around what someone walking by and looking into the room might gather seeing Dean straddling his kid brother, he started shaking Sammy's shoulders. Swimming through his head, zinging to and fro, was the fact that everyone who had died by the ghost of Jonathan Meyers had been asleep.

"Sammy!"

Nothing, the brunette continued lying there beneath his older brother like he, Sam, had fallen victim to a coma. And then a terrible thought crept into the back of Dean's mind, one relentless and too stocky to be pushed away: what if Sam _was_ in a coma? What if all the victim's had lapsed into one, explaining why they never had any marks on them other than the surgical kind, why not a single person had ever heard anything?

"Fuck, I knew I shouldn't have left. Sam!"

If he was in a coma, could he even hear anything going on around him? Was it possible he was in a state akin to some stroke victims, able to see and hear and think but not communicate, or was all hope truly lost?

It was best not to think about things like that, to not dwell on such dark things, but how could Dean not? He didn't know what else he could possibly think of – somehow, preoccupying himself with the latest Bradjolina gossip seemed a little too sick and wrong for the current state of the world – he didn't know how to stop the spreading cloak of darkness in his mind.

Looking down at his younger brother, whose eyes were moving around beneath their lids as if he was in the middle of R.E.M sleep, whose body lay like a mass of rubber on the bed, Dean couldn't not think of how Sam might be waiting for the final out. That inevitable final out, the one everyone was hoping to hold up by hitting foul ball after foul ball, but poor Sam had always been a lousy baseball player and time was running against him.

"It's going to be all right, Sammy," Dean tried to shakily comfort himself more that his brother. "It's going to be okay. I don't know if you can hear me or not, but if you can just know that Dean's going to get you out of this. Sammy, I'm here. Your brother's here and I'm not going to walk away from you this time."

Though Dean had said those words, he didn't even know if they were true. _Was_ everything going to be all right? _Was_ he going to be able to pull Sam out of the clutches of a demonic man with a pension for death?

The chances of that happening seemed bleak, so far away that they were nothing less than a faintly glowing speck off in the horizon.

&&&

Meyers was sitting calmly in his seat, though stiffly. It was like he knew that if he put too much weight on that decayed wooden chair he would shatter it and send his ghostly ass to the concrete floor. With his fingers entwined, hands in lap, he acknowledged Sam like a restaurant manager interviewing a possible dish washer.

"I can tell, Samuel, that you're rather upset by this news," Meyers said evenly.

"No shit."

The doctor clicked his tongue. "I expect that language coming from your brother, boy, by not from you."

Sam unsuccessfully tried to shrug his shoulders. "You know what they say, great expectations…."

Narrowing his eyes, Meyers seemed to do what he had done in the church: grow to a bigger size. It wasn't visible, not in any real sense of the word, but Sam could have sworn the kook had puffed himself up right before his very eyes anyway – like in the cartoons, the guy'll put his thumb in his mouth and blow himself up like a balloon.

"And what are _your_ great expectations, Samuel, other than your electric shock brother coming to your rescue?" The doctor smirked at the words electric shock, of that Sam was sure, like those two innocent enough words when separated were a joke Sam wasn't yet in on.

Cocking his head to the side and casting a dreamy look up at the ceiling, Sam let out a gentle sigh. "Finally being able to drive the Impala again for a distance greater than two blocks." He looked back at Meyers, grinned like a little boy at the sight of the zoo's reptile house.

"Tell me, boy, how long do you think I'll sit here and swallow your petty antics?"

"Well, Meyers, it _is_ my brain that you've gone and invaded, so I'm sure quite a while."

Sam looked behind Jonathan Meyers and at the door that was green with mold. There was a feeling running to his toes that _that door_ might be the only way he'd be able to wake up. In the Matrix there were the rods jammed up the back of everyone's head, but here Sam had a door that would most likely bring in a tsunami of dirt when it was opened. Right. If his one of his heads weren't chopped off, leaving him to bleed to death, he'd be crushed under the weight of earth. Goody, goody gumdrops.

From the ceiling, the one that would surely be kissing dirt and worms and rock if the one door in the room was opened, Dean was promising that he wouldn't be abandoning Sam again. That was all fine and dandy, but right now all Sam needed was a promise from the lunatic across from him that he wouldn't fillet him like some kind of freaky human cod fish.

Meyers chuckled, a cold shallow sound that aided in lowering the room ten more feet below the land of fire and brimstone.

Brimstone. That reminded Sam that he had checked that book out from the library way back when in California. God, what his fine must be by now. He could have joined in with Meyers's amusement: here he was, strapped to a table about to die sometime in the near future, and he was worried about a book fine?

"I won't be killing you as soon as you might think, Samuel. I'd like to have a talk with you first, as I'm sure you would be fond of as well, and then we shall get down to the slicing and dicing."

"For your bouquet of thanks, do you want lilies or roses?"

Shaking his head, Meyers smiled. "Bleeding hearts, if you'd be so kind."

"Bleeding hearts. Right, I'll try my best to remember that. Might be a little hard, having the frontal lobes of my brain destroyed, but it's the thought that counts."

"Dean is far more talented with wit than you are, boy, so I would leave that to him. But you aren't lagging that far behind him."

Sam rolled his head against the gurney, making to throw his right hand out into the air before he remembered that he couldn't. "Oh, well, a compliment like that deserves a card! Pity, I don't know where to send the damn thing, but I'll figure something out. 'Care of: your mother's cunt' might do, don't you think?"

Flames licked at the glossy black orbs set into Meyers's rotting skull.

&&&

Some nagging sensation kept telling Dean that, as much as he might like to, pouring ice cubes down Sam's shirt or giving him a swift kick in a place that would wake a statue (to save the kid's life, _of course_) that would be a very bad idea. Coma or not trying to wake Sam when he had Doctor Meyers crammed in his brain, raking his rancid breath in his face could do a lot more harm than good.

So no freezing showers, no firing a gun right beside an ear, no body slams, no lies revolving around Jessica reincarnated and walking through the front door, nothing of the sort. Try to help the kid along, maybe, by telling him to wake his own ass up but definitely stay away from any measures that might destroy a mind.

Crushing his brother's chest might fall into that evil category, but Dean couldn't just sit back and do nothing. He was sprawled out on top of Sam like they were in a depraved carnival act, with the grand finale being a brunette with a pulverized rib cage – sure, Dean was the shorter of the two brothers by three or four inches, but Lord knew he wasn't light as a feather. Currently, whomever thought himself with enough stomach to step beyond the tent curtains and into the very pit of hell would find himself in a thick fog of ugliness.

The man on the soapbox outside of the tent, swimming in his white pinstriped red jacket and straw hat, waved his cane around extravagantly as the carnie goers wandered around the fair grounds. They were eating their popcorn and pretzels, their ice cream sandwiches and cotton candy, and some of them stopped by the tent as the soapbox man painted for them images of great, awe inspiring things.

While they stood before the carnival talker – blind to the fact that the rich were marked with white chalk, to be squeezed dry of their money by the night's end – some tried to steal glances inside the tent as others carefully studied the cloth poster hanging behind dear ol' Soapbox Man. Their eyes still wide from their ride on the ferris wheel, they watched as the two men on the canvas poster began to move in response to the carnival talker's bright words.

The image was a dark one, a story of an impending loss that might as well throw the earth into the great star that is the sun. Soapbox Man would, for a costly dime, take these starry eyed carnival visitors "into the very bowels of hell, ladies and gentlemen! To see whether or not one young man can save another from the wordless terror of _la mort_, whether or not he may save _himself_ from a fate worse than death!"

Here he would tap the edge of his soapbox with his maple syrup colored cane. "The precipice, ladies and gentlemen, you've heard of it, but _these young men are on it_! One is even falling into it!" Nodding at the shocked gasps from his growing audience, Soapbox Man would continue on. "One of our heroes is falling _into_ that black crater of death and our other – far too filled with hope for being as only one man – is leaning so far into it–" here he would stomp his cane loudly on the large, over turned wooden box "–that he need only one false move to send him rolling heel-over-head into that bleary and lonely chasm!"

The women in the audience, with their depression era dresses and heeled shoes, covered their mouthes with their hands. The men, some with a glowing target on their backs, put a protective arm around the shoulders of their wives, secretly wondering where the cooch tent happened to be set up. The children, sliding beneath arms and legs to see the carnival talker better or try their luck at peeking into the small gap between the tent sections (at these two heroes drawn out before them on the tapestry), smiled and laughed with grim fascination.

"Ladies and gentlemen, this is the story to end all stories! Do not doubt the power within this tent, the power of agony and despair, and do not doubt that this, _this_, is the product of all our nightmares finally come true – finally rolled into one black moment on a stage for all to see!"

The small group of children, having placed their noses to the gap in the tent wings, recoiled at the snapping sound of the cane being brought down on the crate right close to their heads. They looked up, slowly in the manner of a whipped dog, to see Soapbox Man leaning toward them. Though the straw hat was brought down low on his head, bringing his eyes into shadow, the smile on his face brought a shiver to the small children's hearts.

"Beyond that cloth barrier lies something that not even Homer could have brought to writing, something that _no _mortal man can comprehend. A sinister play the likes of Shakespeare has never seen." Quickly, fast enough to scare the children into tree stump legs, Soapbox Man stood up to his full height with his arms thrown back like wings. "Ladies and gentlemen, I bring to you _the death of innocence_!"

Soapbox Man threw his cane toward the children again, to the gap in the tent wings that grew wider as if on cue. Light the color of honey spilled out onto the many faces crowded around the tent, young and old, fascinated and terrified. Beyond them, at the far side of the tent on a stage behind the many poles holding the ceiling up, displayed for all eyes in a twisted stance of beauty and sickness, was indeed the bloody death of innocence.

"Not if I can help it, Sammy, not if I can help it," Dean whispered into his brother's ear, as if the beloved child trapped with ugliness beyond words would be able to hear the oath better, as if the softly spoken words would somehow be able to bring that child back unharmed.

&&&

The fire was extinguished almost without Sam noticing that it had even begun. "Do you believe your brother, Samuel?" Meyers asked humanely, seeming to be dumb to the comment his patient had made earlier.

His legs were getting heavy with the sharp discomfort of strain, seizing up with pins being driven into muscle. But it wasn't real, it wasn't real, it was not real. "I'm not sure I follow you, Meyers."

"When he says things like that, just now. Granted, I don't know what he was talking about, but I ask if you believe him," the doctor poorly elaborated. "Say, when he tells you that he loves you." He smiled when Sam said nothing, simply looked down at the floor. "He doesn't tell you any such thing, does he?"

"He doesn't need to," Sam replied harshly.

Meyers shifted in his chair, not out of nervousness or fear, but out of amusement. "And you hold that against him, don't you, boy?"

"What, are you deaf now?" Sam spat. "I said that Dean doesn't need to, tell me that he loves me. It's apparent enough as it is!"

"Is it?"

The room and everything in it appeared to be getting more and more vivid each and every time Sam blinked. From the moisture in the air to his sleeping feet, the moment was becoming less and less like a movie and more like real life, real _waking_ life.

Meyers crossed one leg over the other, put his steepled hands over his knee. "See, Samuel, I don't think it is. In your way of thinking, if Dean loved you like he should then he wouldn't have turned you down after the incident in Illinois. What did he say to you exactly, when you implied that you and he should converse about what happened in Ellicott's operating room?"

"You already know, so why are you asking?"

The doctor's face changed with the hint of a smile. "You're right, I do, but I'd like to hear it in your own spoken word. The way you say it to me might be different than the way you recite it in your thoughts. I highly doubt that, but one never knows."

Sighing, perturbed, Sam looked away from his captor. "He said that he wanted to sleep. I wanted to talk to him about what had happened in there, and he just wanted to go to sleep. Sleep, like it wasn't important at all that I had been possessed and tried to kill him. But _now_ he wants to talk about it, _now_ he starts telling me that what I did made him upset."

"You're holding your brother's delayed reaction against him," Meyers said blankly. "Not only that, over the past year on the road with him you've realized how much you hate him. More than you ever thought you did, more than you knew you could ever hate someone."

"No."

"_Yes_," the doctor replied reproachfully. "Your brother ruined your life, he's the one who prevented you from saving your one and only love, and he's the one that got you stuck in this disgusting basement with yours truly."

Sam began tugging at his wrist binds again, head down. "I told you not to mention her."

"I know I did. But I had to bring her up because that's what you think of your brother, isn't it?"

Pain shot up Sam's right arm as he tugged savagely at his binds, screaming at the top of his lungs a single, very angry "_No!_"

The dream was washing away like freshly applied house paint in a thunderstorm.

Meyers shrugged his right shoulder, a motion that might have let Sam know (if he had been looking) that the doctor felt for Sam's most definitely dislocated arm. "Then I suppose you'll be glad to know that one of the reasons I've picked you, Samuel, is that it wouldn't have been at all prudent to go after your brother. He's diseased, but in more ways than one."

Absolutely livid and now confused, Sam set his eyes on Meyers – sitting in that fucking chair so smartly with that stupid smirk on his face.

"Oh, he didn't tell you? Yes, Dean is quite ill and it wouldn't have been at all prudent of me to kill him when he'll be clocking out in the next month or so anyway. There's nothing anyone can do for him, I'm afraid – not even that quack Ellicott could have helped him – except maybe a money hungry faith healer. Frankly, I'm quite surprised you didn't know. You see, he's been aware of his condition for a long time now."

_"Electric shock."_

Those words echoed in Sam's skull cavern, and he felt as though he had finally been let in on that joke. If he was on a children's cartoon Sam's face would have gone redder than a maraschino cherry and stream would have erupted from his ears.

"Yes, Samuel, I have to agree with you. Dean doesn't need to tell you, it's already evident that he loves you _very_ much," the doctor replied sarcastically, unfazed with his victim's attitude.

&&&

Dean just didn't know what to do, plain and simple. He had been watching his little brother slide further and further down the mouth of the lioness and he just couldn't do a damned thing to stop it.

Suddenly, as if that realization had flipped a switch in his mind, all the walls came down, every last bulwark that kept the world out. Twenty-two years of anger, resentment and pride broke through the bearing walls and unleashed a torrent of tears and ragged breathing.

"Sammy!" Caring about how understandable he was was now at the bottom of the Things to Worry About list. "Please, Sammy!"

Getting off his brother, nervously walking around the room as his cried, Dean wandered to the door and absently closed it. Naturally, because he had kicked it in, the door didn't rest in the jamb as it should have, but as long as it prevented anyone from coming across a blubbering stud muffin….

The motel walls might have been paper thin, but Dean nevertheless let an animalistic, high-pitched moan build up within his core and come spewing out of his mouth. He was starting to hyperventilate, unable to breathe like he was outside again with the shrink wrap glued to his face, but this time there was no way of peeling it off or running to safety.

Humming when he wasn't making noisy, shallow yet heaving gasps for air, Dean paced around Sam's bed. He put his hands to his throat, limply, and felt the freezing cold skin send blades of ice down and through his spine.

Dean's worst nightmare was coming true ten fold and he was helpless to stop it. Sam was in trouble, deep trouble and the only person to get him out of it was Sammy himself. Yelling at him wasn't doing anything, Sam might not even be able to hear anything Dean was saying, but in his current state of panic trying again might trigger something, _anything_.

"Sam, you need to wake up, buddy. You've gotta wake up!"

Falling to his knees beside the bed, Dean put a violently shaking hand to his brother's chest. Touch was good, a beating muscle below that touch was even better, and it proved that Sam was still alive – but for how long?

That question made the crying rise several octaves; rise to a pathetic, incessant screeching sound resembling a whine. Entire body racked with tremors, Dean bowed his head to form the stance of a bastard's prayer.

"You can't die on me, Sammy. You've gotta fight, you've gotta come out of this thing alive. I don't know what I'm ever gonna do without you. I can't make it through these dark days without you!"

By now the time had passed for sensible thought and action, by now all one freak show hero had left in him was an endless pit of sorrow. No longer was Dean Winchester simply trying to wake his brother, his poor little brother stuck in the vice grip of a coma-like state of being, he was now trying to cleanse what little bit of soul Dean might have had (somewhere buried underneath yards of bravado and arrogance).

"I'm sorry, Sam. I'm so sorry for everything I've ever said and done to you to make you hurt. I love you, but I'm so envious of you that it comes off as hate or, worse, passiveness. I take back everything, Sammy, _everything_ I've said over the years – I love you, kid, so much it's gotta be on the cusp of wrong – but you've gotta wake up. Sammy – my Sammy – _you have to wake up_!"

The words didn't come out right, not from Dean's thoughtlessly blank mind to his mouth, but he was deaf to that fact. All Dean now knew was a burning soul and a brother slowly dying – but with a strong and still beating heart. To Dean his words weren't coming out as a jumbled mass of sobs and whistling, wavering inhalations – they weren't coming out as anything, for he wasn't even aware that he was speaking.

"I know you want to be with Jessica again – God, I'm sorry I had to look at her chest like that when I first met her – and I know how badly you wanna know Mom without having to go through pictures or Dad and mine's stories. But I'm a hard ass, Sammy. I'm a hard ass and I won't let you leave me here all alone! Please. Please, God, you've gotta wake up. Don't do this to me. My sweet little Sammy, don't do this to me. _Don't leave me here alone, don't go where I can't follow_!"

He was now at the point where he was the most desperate he'd ever been in his life, reduced to doing whatever flashed into his mind – right then thwomping Sam on the chest with weakly formed fists.

"Sooner or later everyone is going to leave me." But the sentence his sleeping brother heard was only something like a song on a horrifically scratched vinyl record. "Please, Sammy, don't make that be true. _Don't make that be true_!"

&&&

"I'll tell you something now, Samuel." Meyers leaned back in his chair, making it creak slightly with the dispersed weight.

Sam didn't like the feel of the rusted gurney against the palms of his hands. "What, are you a hermaphrodite now? You don't need to show me, but it would better explain why you're so fruity about sex and sex organs. You're ashamed of yourself, dusgusted with yourself, so you take it out on everyone else."

"I thought I told you to leave the witty remarks to your brother?"

Sneering, Sam raised his eyebrows. "Oh, did I hit a nerve?"

Meyers's face became like stone, like a very vexed stone. His tone didn't express that emotion, but the way he hitched his thumb to the area of basement wall behind him did. "If you can walk out of that door, Samuel, I'll back away from you and your brother. I will stop pestering you and let you move on to the next stop on your Save the World list."

Disbelief and suspicion clouded Sam's eyes, but he looked longing to the basement door anyway. Monstrous wave of dirt or no, he'd like it very much to open that moldy slab of wood and get as far away from that basement room and that insane doctor as his legs would be able to take him.

"There aren't any tricks, boy. The binds holding your body to that table will be separated from you, and all you'd have to do is walk through that door. Simple as that."

Nothing in Meyers's face, nothing in his body language or tone of voice suggested that there was a catch. He might have still been upset about the whole _zwitter _insult Sam had shot at him, but the anger present in him wasn't the kind to bring about rash actions. Okay, maybe rash wasn't the right word in dealing with a loopy surgeon for the criminally insane, but there really was nothing to be seen in him that convinced Sam that he shouldn't make a try for that exit.

"What do I have to do, apart from run my skinny white ass over to that door?"

Meyers raised his hands briefly before settling them back onto his left knee, the gesture a kind of a half sincere _"I hadn't really thought of that"_. After a short pause, one in which he clicked his tongue for the second time so far, Meyers looked hard at his patient. "I suppose you could ask me what you've been meaning to ask for the longest time now, before it makes your heart explode."

Sam shook his head. "I don't–"

"But you do."

Thinking about it, watching as the slime on the walls grew more vibrant and shiny, feeling how the muscles about his right shoulder blade became more rock-like every second, Sam frowned. "You want me to ask you what my brother wants, don't you? What he'd give up his life for."

Meyers nodded. "Actually, that's what _you_ want. I'm simply bringing it up, since you mention doing something for the ability to leave this place behind you."

For the longest time Sam remained quiet, staring down at his dirty tennis shoes, but eventually he lifted his head to meet the doctor's quizzical gaze. "What does Dean want so much? What is it that he'd sell his soul to the devil for? What is it he'd leave me behind for?"

Rising to his feet, Meyers took from the left hip pocket of his dingy, dried blood stained coat a scalpel badly in need of a cleaning. He walked over to Sam, waving the instrument of terror around like an evil fairy and her wand, and even though the scalpel was old and rusty it still caught enough light to make the moment a bit more unsettling.

"Oh, he only wants someone to love him like Jessica loved you, like your mother loved your father. Heck, the boy would be happy settling for you to love him like most brothers love their siblings. That's what he'd let me cut him open for," Meyers explained, leering at the scalpel he waved about the air in front of Samuel Winchester's chest. "Well!" He pocketed the scalpel again, smiling his teeth rot smile that finally showed something lurking just below the surface. "Are you ready to try for that door now?"

Sam felt like gum stuck to the bottom of someone's shoe, like absolute crap. "Yes, I'm ready," he said sadly.

Meyers clapped him on the shoulder, the one not popped from its socket. " That's a good boy."


	16. Sixteen

**Chapter Sixteen ; Paint Me Dead**

For all of his madness, for all of the people he mutilated over the years because of a sick conviction in his head, Doctor Jonathan Meyers took great care in removing the leather straps from Sam's arms, from his legs, from his chest. He even made a hissing wince when – accidentally? – he pulled at the wrist restraint to Samuel Winchester's right arm as it was being undone; flashes of steroided pain drilled into the kid's arm, so great that bottling down a yelp was impossible.

"If you'd like, Samuel," Meyers began as he started work on the other wrist bind, "I could pop that back into place for you."

Sam stopped gritting his teeth long enough to say, "How do I know you're not going to just cut it off?"

Meyers laughed shortly, kneeling down to work on his patient's ankle straps. Placing his hands on one cracking brown leather bind, the doctor raised his head to look at Sam with a gravely serious face. "And how do I know that you aren't going to kick me in the head once I undo this here restraint? You're thinking about it, boy, about striking me unconscious and tying _me_ to that gurney."

"My hands are free," Sam observed wistfully, "I could have just pissed on you and been done with it."

Standing, the doctor retreated back to his chair and settled himself back down into it. "Would you really chance that, Samuel? Would you _really_ risk upsetting me? If you're scared of driving your brother over the edge, you must be close to wetting yourself when you think of how I might – what's the word you kids are using today? – _freak_?"

Sam scoffed. "I'm not scared of my brother, Meyers. Dean couldn't even put his batting helmet on correctly."

"That's a very comical image, Samuel, but you know just as well as I do what he does when he's angry – when he's _that_ kind of angry." The doctor, almost visibly satisfied with the chance to speak with his captive for a time longer, smiled like a reptile. "You start to get twitchy, I imagine, when Dean squares his shoulders, when he makes that cock jerking motion with his head and neck. You all out run when his eyes glaze over with the sheer barbaric rage you recognized in the church, in the face of that Bruins fan."

"Where the fuck are you getting all of this?"

But, even though all Sam had to do was bend down and untie the final two binds himself, he was starting to get uncomfortable. He was starting to get the kind of uncomfortable that only comes when someone knows something they shouldn't, like when the girl you have a crush on _somehow_ finds out how you feel about her and confronts you about it in front of the entire seventh grade.

"What did he break?" Meyers asked innocently, as if he was asking himself what color sweater vest he should wear to a luncheon.

Sam shook his head, fiddled with the cotton drawstring of his pajama pants. "Dean's dying, I hate him so much I don't give a rat's ass about it, and now I'm afraid of him? God, you come up with the more ridiculous shit."

"What did he break?" the doctor asked again, just as calmly. "That night when you were twelve, what did Dean break? You were in a bright orange cast for what seemed like ten years, weren't you? A bright orange cast that hardly anyone signed."

"No. No, I wasn't," Sam denied curtly.

Like a screwy tug boat, Meyers kept on going. "You were in your room trudging through your homework–"

"I was not."

"–simply minding your own business, listening to the radio, when Dean came charging into the room. He–"

"Shut up! Just shut up!"

Meyers seemed to be enjoying himself. "–was screaming his head off about something, his face had gone red, and you fell off your desk chair because seeing your brother like that scared you so badly. But not only that, you fell off that chair because you knew fully well that you were the reason your older brother was that angry."

"_Shut up!_"

But, of course, the doctor did no such thing. "You had been a silly child, a silly irrational child, and had taken Dean's most prized possesion, his baseball bat, out to the backyard–"

If anything, the anger boiling Sam's blood drove the final nail into the coffin of the fantasy in this situation. He was no longer in a dream, not by a long shot. "Shut up, you goddamn piss face!_ Shut up!_"

"–and had finally done what your father asked you to do. Samuel, you had been so upset over how much of a perfect son Dean had been, how he always seemed to instigate the fights between you and your father, that you had taken a hatchet to Dean's last remnant of a normal life."

"I did no such thing! _I did no such thing_, you filthy prick!"

The most bemused expression adhered itself to the doctor's face. "Your father had been bothering you for days about target practice, gently trying to push you in the direction of work so that when the moment came you did come across a werewolf or wendigo or other specter you wouldn't wind up dead. So that's what you had done, you practiced and you practiced on Dean's dearly beloved baseball bat."

Enraged, Sam forget he was still attached to the gurney and made to hop off the rusted thing and bash in the doctor's skull. He nearly fell on his face.

"You put it back in your brother's room – an eye for an eye, that's what your message was – and when he came home that night he saw it sitting there on the shelf above his bed, hacked down into a most disturbing sight. Samuel, you broke that poor man, and in your fit of prepubescent anger that was what you had wanted. In your preteen head, you were only getting even. You couldn't do anything to your father, the one who _really_ stomped out any hope of normalcy, so you went to the next best thing."

"_I'LL BREAK YOUR GODDAMN NECK!_ _Shut your mouth!_"

Meyers made a sound halfway between a giggle and a full fledged snort. "Is that what Dean had told you? Is that what he yelled at you when he grabbed you by the arm, when he got so caught up in his rage that he _broke_ that arm?"

Sam made a choking sound in his throat.

"You had told your father, the doctors that you had fallen from a tree, is that right? You were put into a cast and that was it. Since then Dean's forgiven you, realized that you were only twelve when you did what you did, and you've forgiven him. He hadn't been thinking clearly, not with the image of his destroyed bat still floating around inside his head, and when he had every intention of taking you to see what you had done… things got a little out of hand. But you've also, since that day, felt like a monster, haven't you?"

If he had still been in a dream, daggers would have shot from Sam's eyes and dived into the doctor's heart – if there was even a heart in there.

"And judging by the way you were yelling at me, boy, I'd say that there's no reason for you to be frightened of your brother. _Dean_ might be terrified of _you_, but the other way around is like a lynx being afraid of a blade of grass."

In that dream which was no more, steam would have also shot out of Sam's nose as he bull snorted.

"Samuel, you really do have some serious issues here," Meyers diagnosed happily. "I'm amazed you haven't yet hung yourself."

An exasperated whinny passed by his teeth, like Sam was no more human than a horse was from a sloth.

"My problem? _My problem_?" Meyers chortled, having read his patient's thoughts. "I suppose I can tell you that, can't I? Don't worry, boy, my offer to walk out of that door is still good, but since you'd like to know what my problem is you might want to wait a spell."

The pressure against his brain subsiding, Sam shut his eyes and waited for the lightheadedness to pass. When it did, he bent down as best he could to attempt to free his ankles. "Don't _you_ worry. I might be highly pissed off at you, but I won't bash your brains in with my foot. I'd rather not get your gunk on me."

Meyers no longer seemed amused by the slightest thing. He rose from his chair and hustled over to Sam with earnest, undid the leather straps around the boy's ankles, and straightened his back. He looked at his patient momentarily, dead eyes now with a tinge of puss yellow-green staining the former white areas around the irises, and waved his left hand impatiently off to the side of the room. If the doctor _wasn't _bipolar, he certainly did a good job in acting like he was.

"Emily, please bring a chair, for this might take a while."

As the German nurse materialized in a dark corner of the basement, walked into the middle of the room with a chair in her arms (managing it far better than her husband had with his), Sam watched her with a blank mind.

Though he would say no such thing, through mouth or mind, Sam was happy for the detour. The longer he had to think up a play, the better off he was. Lord knew poor Dean couldn't do anything – his watery sobs still coming into the room fifty floors below Hades, but finally starting to show their distance – except thankfully remain by his brother's side. When and if Sam ever woke up, he'd need to say a lot of things to Dean as soon as he possibly could.

The chair Meyers's wife had brought them, another rackety buffet for mold and termites, she set in a spot of floor right behind Sam. Because they were no longer in a dream, Emily had to push the gurney back to do it, the wheels screaming out in a rhythmic protest straight from a horror movie.

"_Danke_," Sam said to her as she began walking back to the crypt-like corners of the room, her long ago white and blood free dress swishing loudly.

Emily didn't turn around, but told her husband's prisoner to "_sitzen Sie_" rather harshly before being eaten by shadow.

Doing as he was told, Samuel Winchester sat down across from the maddest of all hatters. With a doctor staring at him like he was a piece of prime Angus steak, a nurse who could turn herself into a shadow, and an older brother who – though Sam loved him for it all the same – _just wouldn't calm down_ and seemed to be getting farther and farther away from him every second…. Sam was becoming distressed.

But he mustn't show it. If he started to show his panic now (real, unabridged panic not hidden behind anger) Sam was fucked – quite violently. Just act like Dean would and he'll be fine. Just act like a great southern blues musician (real or posing as one just for a song), sitting up there on stage, and put all anxiety and fear into playing that guitar. Oh, but how how how how.

"Meyers," Sam began to break the silence, "I don't know if you know this, but I can't read your thoughts."

"No?"

Sam shook his head. "Nope. I get preminissions, but I'm not telepathic. Sucks balls, really," he leaned back into the chair, "but beggars can't be choosers."

The doctor bent his head to the side, just a millimeter but it was noticeable. "No, I don't suppose they can."

Instantaneously, as if Meyers's tick had sent up a thousand red flags, Sam was brought back to Illinois, to the tall building with a million seeing eye windows, to the younger and saner Dr. Ellicott. God. Were _all_ doctors this frustratingly musing? They wanted their answers, they wanted to pick away at the scab to see what laid underneath it, but did they have to be this… this….

"Dreamily abstracted? Yes, most repeat everything you might say with an airy quality of amazed wonder about their voice, but it's a tactic."

"I gathered that, thank you."

If Meyers couldn't come up with another way of announcing his humored pleasure, Sam was sure to sew the man's decreped mouth shut – with his shoelaces if he had to.

"Don't be so frugal, Samuel," Meyers coddled. "Here we use only the finest needle and thread. In fact, let me show you. Emily!"

Before Sam even had a chance to react to the look in the doctor's eyes, before his own could grow wider than saucers and before he could turn around to see where the nurse would be coming from this time, Emily was on him.

&&&

Sammy didn't scream, didn't so much as let out a muted gasp, so Dean did it for him.

Yelling incoherently, Dean watched as Sam's head was pulled back on the pillow, his neck at an unnatural angle. A clump of the younger man's hair, by his forehead, was standing up stock straight as if an invisible hand was trying to see how well Sam's conditioner worked. While that imperceptible hand kept the youngest Winchester brother's head in the preferred position, another was sewing the boy's mouth shut. At least that's what Dean thought was happening, for there wasn't a speck of thread or a needle to be seen – but the roll of holes popping up above Sam's upper lip, below his lower made it hard to conclude anything else.

Trickles of blood began pooling by Sam's nose or sliding down his chin, and from somewhere within the furthest reaches of Dean's soul he heard his brother's muffled cries of pain. Not out of reaction to hearing those distant, anguished screams – but because he was able to _feel_ the thread and needle going through his own mouth, just like he could feel the dislocated right shoulder and pulsing finger with the ripped back nail – Dean brought both of his hands to his horrified face.

Too much sand was in the bottom half of the glass timer now, far too much.

&&&

Any last hope lurking within Sam of still being locked in a dream was extinguished like a candle: moistened fingertips pinching out the flame. Tears were streaming down his face from eyes that only occasionally were open in a wide, disturbing expression of pain and fear.

Sam, kicking his legs and waving his arms in a useless plea for an end to the pain, felt as though his jaw was going to shatter. His screams had nowhere to go, not with his lips being quickly and efficiently closed off forever, and so they built up in his mouth. They formed a rag, those screams, and it seemed to grow larger and thicker in his mouth the more he tried to cry out for someone, anyone to "mmmm, _mmmmm_!" the excruciating distress he was in. His brain was trying to tell him to cease with the screaming, to just shut his cake hole before he choked to death or his jaw ripped from its hinges (whichever came first), but his voice box would have none of that.

Still screaming out uncontrollably as Emily finished her chore, her face void of anything close to emotion, Sam tried hard not to admit to himself that he was doomed. This was only a minor set-back, he wanted to believe, a very small one that would take up a bit of time – but he'd still be able to get his sorry behind out of the basement and back into room number twelve of the Driftwood Motel.

Yeah. Sure. _Right_. And gerbils could fly planes.

After Emily had walked away, her chunky white-turned-grey hospital heels clacking sinisterly against the concrete floor, her husband grinned widely. He watched, relatively unmoving, as Sam stopped his screaming and sat limply in his chair, head dipped forward to his chest. The kid was crying, silently without shaky breaths or shuddering shoulders, but crying nonetheless.

"Now, Samuel, maybe you'll finally put those kind of remarks behind you. I was getting rather annoyed," Meyers added.

Sam raised his head, blood sliding down his chin and onto his dark blue nightshirt or slipping into his mouth – how he hated the taste of copper. With eyes covered by fog thicker than that hanging above the London of yesteryear and a head that bobbled drunkenly on its perch, Sam looked as though he wouldn't be able to answer even the most brainless of questions, wouldn't be able to even recall his own first name.

Meyers rubbed one of his hands against the other, clasped them together like the doctor thought them cold. "Boy, I hope you aren't going to go falling onto the floor. Such a handsome face, we wouldn't want it any more ruined by a broken nose or gashed forehead."

Though Sam was rocking slightly in his chair, he didn't appear to be close to tumbling out onto the filthy floor. If anything, the knowledge of what might be festering on that floor gave himself enough strength to keep his butt parked on the chair seat.

"Good," the doctor voiced simply.

Sam might have given him a look that said, "Oh, yes, _terrific_."

King Zany chose to ignore his captive's facial expression, whistled. "My, my, isn't your head snowy? Certainly not as good with pain as your brother. A few painkillers to quell his chest pains and he's good to go. Why do you think _he_ is the one to always get the coffee?" Meyers added, knowing that Sam might have been confused by that statement. "He won't reach into his endless bag of pills in front of you, he thinks you're too fragile to see something like that."

Another look, this time: "Get off your goddamn tuffet, why don't you?"

"Well," Meyers got into a comfortable position in his chair, "you wanted to know what my problem was and, now that you've quieted down, I'll tell you."

Even in his hazy state of mind, Sam found it in him to roll his eyes.

"I'm not like your brother, boy. I won't sit here and tell you about my dismally boring life, make up a few exciting lies to spice the story up, but I will tell you what you've been searching for."

Sam: "Gee, I wouldn't have dreamed of having it any other way. And my brother doesn't embellish his life _that_ much, asshole."

Meyers looked up to the ceiling, smiling like he could see a happy memory dancing around up there.

The Winchester captive looked up as well, found nothing, and lowered his head. He had a mind to rest his chin against his chest again, but when the doctor began his story he was too weirded out to do any such thing.

"I was born in Vermont, Ira to be precise, to a steel worker and a housewife – that's what women did in the olden days. I had one sibling, a brother ten years my senior, who died of an enlarged heart when I was eight. He used to always walk me home from school, but one day he never came. Jeremiah, that was his name, he wanted to be a medical doctor and I came into that same profession not because I was pushed by my parents but, maybe because I loved my brother a little _too_ much. I had thought that following in his footsteps would prove my love to him, you see, and that he would know that though he was dead and gone I would love no other man. I thought, what greater sign of an undying, albeit unnatural, love than that?"

Sam threw up in his mouth, but because his lips were sewn shut he had to swallow his vomit back down to his stomach again. As if having (because of the doctor's perverted relationship with his sibling) the image of Sam and his own brother… he also had to puke and be forced to swallow it.

"I know, I know, but I was of such a young age when it began happening. I didn't know rape from a steam engine. I twisted the situation around in my head to such a point where, well, one day after Jeremiah had been dead several years I let it slip. Since my brother's death my parents had been touchy about the medical field, who could really blame them, and wished for me to pursue a different career. I told them I would not and why I would not. It must have been the way I said it, for they threw me into the nearest asylum 'for my own good' and didn't look back."

Without thinking about it, letting the doctor assume he was actually listening to the explanation of his actions, Sam began devising a plan of escape. Surely the only way to get out of this place alive was to kill Meyers, to release his grip from Sam's conscious, but just how was still the jackpot question.

"I spent eight years in that place, was subjected to every nightmarish procedure imaginable to cure my sickness. When I _was_ mended, lacking a few extremities and parts of the brain, I had realized my true calling. I went back to school, began studying at the Wade House in New York state, met my wife. Granted, I could never _love_ her, but she hadn't seemed to mind. As you might conclude, Samuel, I was relatively sane until I began my experimentation on random citizens. Emily and I had felt strongly that a plague had been unleashed on the world, a vile disease that needed to be eradicated, and so we went out and tried to help those people."

Through his bleeding, stinging, swelling lips Sam scoffed.

Meyers tipped his face, a confused expression dusting his features. "I feel no shame in what my wife and I did, boy, just like you do not feel badly for killing your creatures of the night. We were helping those poor people, trying to aid them into wellness, but unfortunately those who didn't die were permanently damaged. When the police tried to solve their puzzle, townspeople saying that it was I doing all of those 'brutal slayings', I had been at the height of my career. Emily and I moved here, to Arrowsic Island, so that my life wouldn't have been destroyed."

Sam lifted his head in order to shoot a glance, "_Yours_ might not have been destroyed, but what about all of those people you plucked off the street?" and then hung it down again.

"By then it had been much like an impulse, boy, a desire and a need to go on helping people. For understanding's sake, it was like you and your preminissions – I could not ignore my impulses any more than you can now turn your back on those dreams of yours. But, sadly, the residents of Arrowsic Island did not share my views.

"For a while I had been able to control my hands by locking myself into this basement, having Emily bring my meals down and so on and so forth. But I _couldn't_ eat, boy, and I couldn't sleep. I had wasted away to sixty pounds before I simply couldn't take it anymore. I would travel to other small towns some distance away from here, but it hadn't been the same. So I had brought my sights back to this island to _murder_ here again, _slay_ and _maim_ and _ruin_."

Meyers rose to his feet for the umpeenth time, waved a wroth fist at Sam. "But I did no such thing! I was helping those people, like I myself had been helped, but they never did appreciate it. If what they say I did to those Infected rings true, then I stand before you a _mutilated_ man. But that I am not, Samuel. I am cured man. If nothing else, I am cured!"

The doctor's arm falling slacken to his side, he sighed and sat back down. "The police came on a beautiful March night, took my wife and I away and threw us into one disgraceful prison cell. She slit my throat with a razor blade, then she took it to her own."

Again, Sam lifted his head. His face glowed with a single word, coward, but not because Meyers had committed an act of murder-suicide. Coward, the doctor was, because his wife had to kill him _for_ him.

This time, Jonathan Meyers chose to not write off his captive's expression.

"There's a belief that few people have, boy, that when a person dies their soul is used to save someone else; their soul, for a reason unknown, is dying when it's not set to until much further in the future. In today's language, you might say the recently deceased's soul is stuffed into a freezer until ready to use."

Sam's face clearly said, "I couldn't care less."

"Samuel, when you were a baby you came very close to dying. You had known it then. Only a few bushels old and you had already started to receive your dreams, at the time one in which the flames eating your mother's corpse would burn down your room with you in it. Dean had known it as well, had felt it – which now I realize might have something to do with why he sprinted back into the equation. But you weren't suppose to die then, oh no, the demon your father's chasing had come along and shaken things up."

Meyers grinned.

"The police buried my wife and I here, you know. In the middle of the night, at the base of a tree by our home, they buried us. As decoys they took two homeless people from the city and put them in the graveyard behind the church, in unmarked graves. _Those_ are the bodies the islanders buried, you were half right about that. You've wondered why, boy, you feel that this island is your home? Because I considered it mine. Samuel, my soul was the one the Gods used to save yours."

Shock, along with a little bit of pain from his sewn lips and dislocated shoulder, that was the emotion now registered on Sam's face.

"You have my soul, boy, and I'd like it back. If you can't get out of that door within the next four minutes, I'm afraid your dear old brother is going to be succumbing to his illness very much alone."

Almost faster than Sam's pain sluggish mind could comprehend, Mad Doctor Meyers whipped out not his pliers but a freakishly large syringe. He jabbed it in the meaty flesh immediately above Sam's left knee, cackling something fierce.


	17. Seventeen

I'm sorry for such a weak conclusion, but my mother won't leave me alone and I just can't concentrate anymore. I have a dead-line with this and… ugh. I also changed a couple of words around in chapter fifteen. Brain dead didn't sound right to me, not coming from an asylum doctor.

**Chapter Seventeen ; The Bed That I Have Made**

Doctor Jonathan Meyers appeared to be all too much amused by the situation. He was tickled pink, tittering like the world would be ending within the next minute and laughing up a storm had been his dying wish. It was disorienting to hear, especially coupled with a crazed Dean who wouldn't shut up and a hippopotamus syringe stuck in Sam's leg.

Staring at that syringe, pumping a warm mystery serum through his blood stream – warm like a summer's day back in California, lying with Jessica in the tall grass at the park, identifying rabbits and trains and ducks in the sky – Sam rolled his head to the side. His eyes were telling as the doctor reached over to extract the large animal syringe, narrowed yet bright in what could have been a "Huh. How 'bout that?" expression.

Whatever the heck might have been in that needle, whatever might have been working its way to Sam's heart to be carried to the rest of his body, Sam had no clue. Hell, maybe it was a pain killer, Vicodin or some equally as strong tranquilizer. But after what had happened to him so far, Sam wouldn't have been surprised to find out that the clear liquid invading his bloodstream was some kind of deadly nerve gas in serum form. So sooner than later Sam was going to collapse to the floor, flopping around like a fish out of water, and that would be the end of him. Or maybe the last sentence of the book he had been so impatient with didn't run like that, maybe the stuff in him – when it arrived at that highest plateau – would eat away his brain like a man starving to death at an all you can eat buffet.

Anyway you flipped it, the coin looked grim. Grimmer than anything Poe could have dreamt up in any one of his inebriated states, and those had been Grim with a capital G.

Maybe it was from the pain of having his mouth sewn shut, maybe because of this hoodo voodo racing through him, to Sam the world was starting to rotate drunkenly on its axis. Even the doc's words seemed to have shot down a little too much eggnog in preparation for the upcoming holiday festivities. They danced through the air, whirling and twirling like some kind of drugged hippie, and by the time they reached Sam's ear the mad doctor might as well have been speaking an alien language from another galaxy.

"A minute is a long time," Meyers said, his words visibly stretching and scrunching and popping like soap bubbles, "but with the state you're in, boy, maybe not long enough."

No, Sam didn't think so either. A minute _was_ a very long time, but even with four of them the notion of making it out of the chair and to the door seemed on the disheveled side of impossible.

Meyers, not laughing anymore but still with the aftershocks of a smile on his face, sat back down in his damned old chair for what might have been the hundredth time. He waved his left hand about wistfully, like he was about to talk about a superlative dinner he might have had at a fine dining establishment. "This all comes down to what you have in you, Samuel," he began matter-of-factly.

Have Samuel down in you. Right, okay, can do.

Winchester started to lean too far forward in his chair, his head so foggy he needed a lighthouse's spotlight and horn in order to not crash into any nearby rocks.

"Courage, tenacity, will power. Some people have it and some people don't. You've been lumbering all throughout your life in the dark, boy, and I think it's about time we found out whether you're strong enough to survive. No more stealing space from the rest of us, Samuel, this is the moment you prove how much of a man really you are."

If this is what it felt like to get hammered, Sam was ready to back off the booze for the rest of his natural life – however long that was going to be. Forgetting completely that his lips were fused together with a fine, silky black thread, Sam made to reply to what little he had understood of the doctor's survival of the fittest lecture.

"Mm…." He blinked hard, trying not to say his hellos to the basement floor with his face. "Mm mmm mmmmm _mmm_ mmm mmmm?" Sam had meant to say, rather disdainfully, "And you think _you_ have courage? You, a man who had to have your own wife slit your throat because you just couldn't do it yourself?"

"I'm sorry," Meyers said snidely, "I didn't catch that."

Sam made to throw his right arm up, to give the doctor a very unappealing hand gesture, but that arm seemed to just want to hang there like a wet noodle. Turning his heavy head to that uncooperative arm, he simply stared at it as though by doing that it would come back to life.

The bloodthirsty doctor laughed heartily, but it sounded more to his captive like an elephant with a head cold trying to snicker through its trunk. "You've wasted one minute already, Samuel. I'd get a move on if I were you, unless of course you're too yellow bellied."

With the unnamed substance in his body, it took Sam a little longer than necessary to gather what Meyers was going on about. He had a mission to accomplish, Sam did, and if he kept on sitting in his chair like a drunken parakeet it was lights out, sweetheart. And though, through the dense haze filling his head, he knew that he needed to start moving, his legs didn't seem to want to so much as twitch. They seemed to be more like fallen logs than legs, far too heavy for one man – freakishly tall, but scrawny – to manipulate.

Where were the marionette strings when you needed them?

Raising his head, a feat all its own, Sam looked past a giddy Meyers and at the promised exit. There was a halo of golden light around that door, a wondrous beckoning light that had a sense of cocky swagger about it. It was confusing, how an old and rotting door could have a lovable arrogance about it, but then Sam heard his brother. Staring at that door, all the while trying to force himself to stand up – to "just stand up, goddammit" – Sam could _hear_ his stupidly frustrating (but impossible to not love) brother on the other side of it.

The words were faint and broken up, as if Dean was trying to communicate with Sam from the other side of a very long string can connection, but Sam heard them all right. He couldn't understand a single lick of what his brother was trying to put out to the basement room, but he heard it and it was enough to light a fire in his belly. At first that fire was more like a burning match being dropped in a waste paper basket. First nothing seemed to happen, but then everything seemed to happen at once.

As indignation flooding into him it pushed out the pleasantly warm serum of doom trekking to destroy his brain, drowned the fog in his mind enough to think of only one thing. Pushing himself to his feet, legs wobbling and left arm beginning to ache with the stress of having to support a – underweight – nearly two-hundred pound body, Sam's mind was solely occupied with what he had witnessed since coming to Arrowsic Island. He hadn't felt bad enough in Illinois, so Sam had dragged his brother here and had to come across the trash dump for murder. The innocent were being slain for no justifiable reason, his own brother had been considered as the next sacrificial lamb, and now Dean might not ever see his little Sammy again.

Oh, no. Not when there was still so much they needed to talk about, not when Sam was still being punished for breaking the Impala's right headlight, and definitely not when the days were still so young. Over Samuel Winchester's dead body would he leave his brother behind when those days were still so young, stinging with loss but young.

Sam might have lost Jessica, his heart might be a ravenous black hole because of that, but Dean had not only lost Dad in a great sense but Mom was gone to him as well. Sam couldn't remember her, not in the least, but Dean could. Dean could recall her enough to still shove his brother against the side of a bridge for speaking ill of her, to still get an incredible sense of pain in his eyes when he thought about her, and to still have a compelling urge to stifle his kid brother with protection like she might have wanted Dean to.

Let him be damned, the blinding flames in Sam's core were screeching, let him be damned if Sam had to put another boulder on that poor man's back by leaving him _physically_. Dean, it was suddenly apparent to Sam, had lost his brother emotionally. He had always been so conflicted with that – am I holding his hand too tight, am I tethering him too close to me, how far should I let him go from me? If I let him go is he ever going to come back? – that he had shot himself in his own foot. But he hadn't meant to, Sam understood now. Dean might have been one spark plug short of a fully working engine, but he had too much good in his dumb little heart, had seen far too much in his short life, that Sam couldn't leave him now.

He had screamed at his brother, told him that he _should have_ reloaded that gun and shot him, but Dean was still by Sam's side. After everything Sam had ever put him through, Dean was still there.

But not in the basement room, unfortunately. Dean could have picked Sam up when he teetered over to a crumpled heap onto the floor – but at least he didn't break the fall with his face, count your blessings.

Meyers was laughing at his prisoner, and that laughter made Sam ill. He _loathed_ that sound, more than the doctor said Sam hated his brother, and he despised it with so much of a passion that even though he only had "one more minute, boy" he pushed any thought of escape from his mind.

The sheer, unbridled loathing in Sam's head, in his heart and secondhand soul, was roaring like a beast depicted in a horror-suspense novel. It eradicated the mystery stuff that had been jabbed into the muscle above his knee, blew out every last fragment of pain he was feeling from his battle scars, and cleared his head to the point where everything seemed to be like brilliantly shinning crystal.

Pushing himself to the proper standing position with his one good arm – not anyplace close to nimble, but it was good enough – Sam spun around and grabbed his chair. It was almost lighter than air, being nothing more than a large group of termites holding hands, and he could easily lift it from the floor with his left hand – or maybe because he was so enraged it had been that simple.

Cracking like a porcelain doll under the weight of his rage, Sam started to swing his rotten wooden chair in the doctor's general direction. Pieces of the back were starting to sheer off or otherwise completely disintegrate beneath Sam's pulsing fist, but it stayed together long enough for him to give his best _Braveheart_ scream and bring the chair within an inch of the doctor's right temple.

Meyers was sitting in his chair almost comically, his laughter dying away and his smile falling into a deep, shocked frown. But he needn't have worried, for Sam's chair never so much as touched a hair on his head.

At the last possible second Sam flung his left arm around behind him – it would have been a magnificent sea foam green in a Madonna music video – and dropped to his knees, trying his best to kiss them with his stitched mouth.

Emily had come on cue, her heels having picked up its sinister clack, clack, clacking soundtrack. She made no other sound than that, but Sam had reacted to her coming just the same.

The chair didn't come in contact with her. Sam had swung it behind him too late, giving Emily just enough time to rush up behind her quarry the moment the chair past the exact spot she would have been standing in had she come even a second earlier. But she _did_ run herself into Sam, the toe of her right hospital heel jamming itself against the sole of Sam's left sneaker. With a screech, she flew over Sam – who diligently rolled away after he felt Emily's shoe leave the bottom of his – and collided with her husband; who had been so surprised he hadn't thought to try to get out of his chair any earlier than when he saw Emily careening toward him with her weapon raised and ready to kill. Not caring to look and see that the nurse's weapon was a very long, very sharp lobotomy skewer, Sam (now having rolled onto his right side) shoved at the left front leg of Meyers's chair.

Winchester heard them yelp and tumble to the ground, the right side of the chair hitting the concrete floor with a splintering _thud!_, but didn't stop to see whether or not Emily had shiscobobed her loony tune of a husband. He catapulted himself to his feet with all the grace and elegance of a cougar on roller skates, screaming at himself to "Wake up! I'm dreaming, wake up wake up _wake up!_", and flung himself at the green rot basement door.

From the other side of the soggy looking door, as Sam took the knob in his only good hand and made the possibly costly mistake of looking back at his foe – still trying to untangle themselves from each other, yelling and smacking each other – he heard Dean's voice, stronger and brighter than ever before.

"_Twitching? He's _twitching_? Oh my God, he's twitching!" _But there was relief in Dean's voice instead of fear, understanding in place of confusion. _"Yes, Sammy! Come on, kid, wake yourself up. You're doing it so far, buddy, but I don't think_ _you're trying hard enough!"_ Sam could hear the choked sobs (happy this time) in his brother's voice as he most likely shook his, Sam's, shoulders to help him along to the streetcar of wakefulness.

Throwing the door open, telling himself over and over again how he was dreaming and needed to wake up, Sam looked blackness in the face. He didn't know what he expected to find on the other side of the door – a tunnel like something straight out of _Being John Malkovich_? – but he had been sure it wasn't going to be a thick wall of black. Then again, if he opened the door to find himself looking at a giant version of Dean, looking down at the dream Sam with a tear streaked face and enough joy on his face to bring about a heart attack (_"Opened his eyes, he's opened his eyes!"_)… that might have been slightly awkward.

Something cold wrapped itself tightly around Sam's left ankle as he imagined seeing a King Kong sized Dean waiting for him beyond the door jamb. Getting a start, twisting around as he jumped to see who had grabbed his ankle, Sam looked down at Meyers's ghastly acne scarred face. He stomped at it with his other foot, so hard and so vicious it was as if Sam was an arachnophobe trying to stomp kill one of those nasty, nasty spiders.

As the doctor's hand slipped from around Sam's ankle, as a dazed Emily got awkwardly to her feet, reality slipped away like water on an incline. Colors faded or became fuzzy, any sense of logic was gone, and Sam was able to toss himself backward into the blackness behind him without snapping the main line to his sanity.

&&&

Sam came up sputtering and in a great amount of pain, not half of it coming from the fact this his face was shoved up against something solid yet quivering and rhythmically vibrating to a song called _lub-dub-lub-dub_. It was just about to go into the second, highly repetitive verse when he was sharply pulled away from the song maker, his head lulling back to look at a very happy, sopping wet Dean still in the grip of breathe crying (shaky, watery, sharp inhalations followed by explosive, foundation rattling exhalations).

Crap. Sam was still dreaming; Dean had never let _anyone_ see him cry – not even himself.

He was about to voice his complaint out loud when, out of the blue, Dean smacked him hard on his good shoulder.

"Don't you _ever_ do that to me again, do you hear me?" Dean yelled, his eyes red and puffy and snot coming from his nose. "I was out of my fucking mind with worry, you little brat! Here I thought you were dying, watching as puncture marks show up around your mouth and your right shoulder pops loudly from its socket – not to mention the whole mess at the gas station – and here you come out of it like it's nothing unusual!"

Still cradled by his older brother, looking up at him with a slowly clearing head, Sam smirked. Dean was more like a mother than he'd probably ever admit to on his deathbed.

As if Sam had recited that analogy aloud, Dean scowled. "You can't smirk at me like that, buddy, not after all the hell you put me through! What the fuck were you doing in there, anyway, having a goddamn tea party? I wouldn't doubt it, you're always pulling shit like this with me. God, I can't wait – _cannot wait_ – until you have kids of your own. Oh-ho, boy, you'll be sitting there in the living room ripping out your hair, one number away from calling the goddamn cops, and then your kid walks in. There you were, about to have a fucking stroke, and they were out having the time of their fucking life."

Sam laughed, but it hurt his lips badly and so he stopped short. "I love you, too, Dean."

Though he huffed loudly and rolled his eyes, Dean squeezed his brother tightly between his arms just before dropping him and getting down perturbedly from the bed. "Just be glad you didn't die in there, Sammy, because if you did…," he cut his right hand through the air in the universaly known ass-whooping motion.

When Sam smiled, exactly like when he had laughed, hot pain sparked around his lips. He put a hand to them, knowing that he'd find blood and needle holes there, but was surprised in spite of himself. Shaken by the sight of his own blood, Sam tried to get off the bed only to find Dean push him gently back down into the mattress.

"You're not going anywhere, kid. As far as I'm concerned, you're pissing in that bed."

Sam tried again, rolling onto his left elbow and sliding his legs over, but Dean again vetoed that idea. "Don't be disgusting, Dean."

"I'm serious, Sammy. I don't want you going anywhere where I can't keep an eye on you."

When the brunette attempted to roll out of bed again, only to be met with oppositional forces, he swatted at his brother's hands. "Then come into the bathroom _with_ me, you freaking wanker – but keep your back turned. I don't need you making Mr. Winky jokes like you did when I was little, some cases of your nostalgia should never see the light of day."

Dean seemed to frown at the whole idea – of letting his brother get out of bed or not making anymore inappropriate jokes, Sam wasn't sure – but then backed off. He watched warily as Sam sat up, slung his legs over the side of the bed, and held his right arm in his left. "What'd that bastard do to you, anyway?"

Sam wiggled his toes in the plush sand carpeting, as if testing to see how real it was. "Just shoved a big game needle into my leg, 's all. His nurse-wife's the one who sewed my mouth shut. I was the one stupid enough to rip off my own fingernail and dislocate my own shoulder."

His upper lip peeling back from his teeth in a genuine display of empathy, Dean shook his head. "I hope you got him good, but I wonder what was in that needle he jabbed in you?"

Sam shrugged his working shoulder. "I kicked at his face, and I have no idea. Nothing too serious, I imagine. All it did was make me sleepy, like I had taken too much Benadryl or something."

That didn't comfort Dean at all. Frowning more than ever, he waved his hands in a gesture that told Sam to stand up – which he did, unsteadily and with his brother's aid.

"I feel fine now, mostly anyway. Just give me a few extra strength pain relievers from… the nearest drug store and I'll be ready to go." Sam had almost done a major no-no. "From your stash", that was what he had been about to say, "from your secret stash."

Dean narrowed his eyes at Sam, cautious of the pause in his brother's sentence structure, and then shook his head as if to clear it. "Go where, exactly?"

"The Meyerses'."

Coming up beside his brother, turning him so that Sam's right shoulder was facing him, Dean laughed. "Sammy, I don't think the salty island breeze is going to fix that shoulder."

Spreading his legs apart, planting his bare feet into the carpeting, Sam squeezed his eyes shut. "That's not what I mean." He lowered his head to stare through his eyelids at the floor, feeling his brother grip his limp right arm firmly with one arm and place a led hand under his armpit. "The police buried Meyers and his wife there, underneath one of the trees. He told me that."

"Okay, but not before we try to do something about those mouth wounds." Dean sighed and bowed his head, pressed his forehead against Sam's neck before standing up straight again. He remained silent while he brought his legs and torso into the proper pop-your-kid-brother's-shoulder-back-into-place stance. "I can't make this painless, but I'll try my best."

Between a clenched jaw, Sam let out a whistling breath. "Just get it over with."

It was awkward because of the height difference and took quite a bit of doing, but Dean managed to muscle Sam's arm back into its socket. He hadn't wanted to be the one to do it, having to hear Sam make those disquieting grunts and moans of pain, but E.R. doctors were out of the question. They would ask too many questions, put a damper on the entire hunt.

While Sam collapsed back onto the bed, hunched forward with a hand to his shoulder, Dean went out to the Impala. From his duffel bag in the backseat, he took two small white pills from a large, rectangular white plastic container – Wal-Mart's cheap answer to Vicodin. He clenched these in his fist while he went to the trunk and gathered the first aid kit.

Sam didn't yet ask him about the pills when he was handed them, simply swallowed them thankfully with a glass of water from the bathroom, and sat as still as he could for Dean to deal with Sam's wounds most efficiently. Between the burning alcohol and blotting medical gauze, Sam told his brother about everything that had happened since entering the records hall – also, how the fall out there had been on purpose because of the dream and the reason why Sam hadn't wanted to tell Dean about it. He left out the finer details, of course (Dean's illness), but everything else wasn't off limits. Sam ended with how he had kicked at Meyers's face.

Dean said nothing for a long time, seemed too caught up in managing his brother's injuries to do much of anything else. To Sam he looked more tired than after the Sanders incident, more worn and grated and all together fleeting. But he didn't mention it, simply remained the almost perfect patient and waited for his brother to find the words he wanted to use.

Eventually, with a poorly hidden sigh, Dean dropped the rest of the gauze into the first aid kit along with the alcohol and liquid bandages. With a loud clanging sound the lid slammed shut and Dean turned to face his brother.

"The farthest I willed myself to go was the gas station. I was thinking about buying a Twinkie when something happened, this searing pain _everywhere_ like it had been dumped over my head like a bucket of Gatorade, and I knew you were in some pretty deep shit. It's happened before, Sammy. That's why I was in your apartment before it lit up like a tiki torch, why I was in Dad and Mom's old bedroom before you choked to death on that demonic electrical cord, why I seem to show up just about everywhere right before your fire goes out and some guy wearing khaki cut-offs says, 'the tribe has spoken'."

Sam smiled as gingerly as he could to save his lips the agony. "So that's what's all over your back."

"Huh?"

Nodding his head in Dean's direction, Sam said, "On your back there's this nasty blob of yellow and white goop. I thought you might like to know before your chest rips open, and a circus flea pops out telling you you have to go save little Jimmy from the well."

Dean punched his brother playfully in the arm. "Bitch." He rose himself from the bed and shrugged out of his jacket, turning it around by the collar and sneering at the Twinkie remains globed onto the center of the back. Walking into the bathroom, he hurriedly wiped away the mess with a towel and all but ran back into the living quarters – seeing Sam very much alive, a little frazzled and bloody, but alive. "So tell me where exactly you think these cream puffs are buried," he said as he put his prized leather jacket back on, "and when I'll actually be able to torch their sorry asses all the way to Aliquippa."

"There aren't all that many older trees around the lot, mostly young saplings in comparison to what we're looking for, and there's been a lot of erosion up there. I'll bet they're near the edge of the cliff, if not at the base of it by now."

"Well, that narrows our field down, doesn't it?"

Sam watched as Dean's face slowly washed of color, like the drain plug to his face's blood supply had been yanked and yanked hard.

"Dean, what's wrong?"

He shook his head. "Just got a fucker of a thought, that's all."

"Mind telling me about it?"

"Well, he lied to you about going after me, right? I still don't understand why he didn't, I fit his build to a T, but whatever, moving on. What I mean is, what if he lied to you about where he's buried? Sure, he thought you wouldn't make it out of there alive so, it didn't really matter if he told you or not. But the thing is, he could be lying again."

Sam considered this shorty. "You think they're at the church?"

"I don't know, but I do know that he might've been pulling your chain back there. We could go up to where his house used to be, look around for that tree, and find our heads bashed in on the rocks instead."

Standing up, Sam gathered his coat. "We can't hang around here what-ifing. Meyers is one pissed off spirit right now and, I don't know about you, I'd like to shut his ass down before he can take his frustration out on anyone else. Chiefly, me."

&&&

In spite of Dean's whining, the brother's went to the bluff on which Meyers once had a home.

Hours had passed since Sam had nodded off in his motel room, traveled to the Meyerses's Fun House of Insanity, and night had fallen on Arrowsic Island. There wasn't a single star to be seen in the oil black sky, not even the moon, and a silence had fallen over the land so strong that even the waves made no sound. It freaked Dean out, especially, Sam could tell.

Together they walked up the winding rock to the near empty lot, hardly able to make out its shape at the top of the small hill, and tried not to wonder why their shoes made no noise against the ground. It was as though Sam had gone to Deafsville, USA., with two shovels balancing on his shoulder and a brother who in the car had been humming Metallica tunes.

It wasn't just the sound that seemed to have died off either, even the lights in the houses they had passed in the popular end of the island and their street lamps seemed to be sickly. They had touched the night sky with skeletal hands, but made weak imprints that were too easily forgotten.

"Another search for unmarked graves," Dean's voice boomed through the night, loud enough for sleeping children in Sweden to be woken. "I feel like I'm a screwy version of _Groundhog Day_."

Sam walked with his brother up the last bit of hill and onto the sloping grass of the Meyerses' victim memoriam, shoes slipping on birthing frost. "Just keep your eyes open, I'm sure it won't be that hard to spot."

"True. How many savage killers under old trees can there possibly be on an island this small?"

As if there was someone standing over there, holding up a bull's eye lantern, Sam was drawn to the far right side of the lot. "You never know, for all we know they're not buried at all."

"_Great_. And how are we suppose to find them, then? With the bloodhound I carry around in my back pocket?"

Sam cut his hand through the air impatiently, the "come here before I smack you" wave.

Mumbling, Dean followed after his brother to a quiet, overgrown tangle of grass by a mangeled tree, its roots having sucked pure evil from the ground. So they were buried under a tree, all right, but half of it was over the side of the bluff.

Sam handed one shovel to his brother, started scooping earth from a spot a little ways down from the tree's wide girth of trunk.

"Are you sure they're here?" Dean asked, waving his shovel over the side of the bluff face to see if anything was sticking out of it that wasn't normal. "I mean, are you positive? Because if you're not…."

"When has your brother ever been wrong, Dean?"

Turning around, shovels now poised and ready to be used as weapons, the brothers Winchester met Doctor Meyers. He looked utterly unharmed – for a dead guy – and smiled at them with his foul teeth on proud display. In the dark of the morning the doctor seemed to glow, a radiance unmatched by any cheesy Hollywood horror flick. The shrimp might have known it too, standing there with his chest puffed out and acne ghost ravaged face gleaming.

Dean guffawed. "Can't you take a goddamn hint?" he yelled.

Meyers tilted his head in consideration, then looked back at Dean. "Can't you, scarecrow?"

"Oh, no, we aren't turning this around to me," he replied indignantly, waving his shovel at Meyers as a scolding mother might wag her finger. "You went after my brother and now you must die… again."

The doctor's smile shone with an uncanny madness that took whatever hidden light might have been in the sky, and leeched it away. "It must bother you, being that incredibly stupid."

Sam busied himself him in the shadow of a conversation that didn't yet involve him by acting shocked – _shocked!_ – by Jonathan Meyers's visit.

Dean shook his head. "No, actually. No one ever expects anything from me, so when I do things like this–" he tossed his duffel bag to Sam, who grinned slyly at the doctor "–they aren't ready for it, it catches them off guard."

"How is that suppose to knock me off my feet, brain dead?" Meyers asked angrily. "Your brother can't possibly dig down to my grave and take out the needed instruments of arson faster than I can reach over and kill him."

Sam looked down at the greyish duffel bag, the amusement gone from his features. "Must be a shallow grave, even after all of these years. Certainly parasites like you don't get the traditional burial. And you're not in my head anymore, so I _could_ if I really wanted to."

Meyers walked over to Sam, calmly at first, but soon fury was ready to snap and pop from him like a bonfire. He remembered the kicks to his once handsome face, Sam assumed, and didn't like it. "But you don't want to, Samuel, do you?"

He seemed to think about this for a while, then shook his head and dropped the provisions noisily to the ground. Half-heartedly, as if he was mulling over a movie he didn't really want to see, Sam shrugged. "Not really, no."

From behind the doctor's back, filling his mind with feigned anger at Sam for saying such things (he wasn't sure if the doctor could read thoughts when outside a person's head, but it didn't hurt to act like he could), Dean was taking salt from his back pocket and sprinkling it onto the two bodies jutting out from the bluff face. He could only hope that those bodies weren't impostors, two lovers caught in a freak July blizzard and buried under ten feet of snow to die – and now be incinerated by a golden hearted fool wielding salt and a whole lot of balls (big balls, but we've got the biggest balls of all, there, Bon).

"And why might that be, Samuel?" Meyers asked, craning his neck up to eye the youngest Winchester boy in a humorous image better to be laughed at on a later date.

Looking down at the duffel bag, kicking it with his feet, Sam bent down. He made to act like he was going to toss it away with a deep sigh, a realization that getting rid of Meyers was hopeless, but reached into it instead. "Because Dean would rather do it instead." Having taken out the lighter fluid, Sam tossed it to his brother – who ripped off the top and emptied it over the two bodies. They were close together, the mummified corpses, having been buried in one grave without a coffin, which made it much easier to drench in gasoline.

Meyers screamed, an ugly animalistic sound, and charged toward Dean. He was less than a dozen or so feet away, but didn't get to him before Dean took a lighter out of his other back pocket and started it up – tossed down the ninety-nine cent lighter he had bought from Rainbow Brite before the little man had clawed his way out of his stomach prison.

As flames reached out toward the ink blot heavens, Dean tugged charismatically at the lapels of his jacket. "See? _Completely_ off-guard."

In a sight the brothers had seen many times before, Meyers (along with freshly arrived wifey) leaned back and raised their hands to the sky – screaming in the enveloping blaze, writhing in it, really nothing at all to stop a yawn.

&&&

They were going to slink away into the newly dawning morning without anyone knowing what they had done. It was a little depressing, how they had sent Jonathan and Emily Meyers back to hell but not a single Arrowsic Islander would know that. The killings would stop and they would praise their gods for it, not realizing that those gods who put an end to their nightmarish years had been two meddling brothers.

But at least those brothers got an angry motel bill out of the deal, one demanding payment for a kicked in door. When Dean had seen it, taped below the brass 12 on their door, he had told Sam to pack up, head out. And heading out was what they were doing, as quietly as they could at two in the morning with a car engine that didn't understand the term stealth.

Neither of the Winchesters said anything until they were well out of Georgetown, stopped at a stop-and-go light that appeared to hate their surname with a seething passion: it remained stuck on red with a death grip helped along by steely talons.

"Hey, Dean?" Sam asked slowly, gently in a way that suggested he was on a patch of thin ice.

The blonde turned his head just enough to let his brother know he was paying attention, but didn't take the majority of his concentration away from the burning red top light. "Hmm?" He looked like he was about to get out of the car and throw rocks at that traffic light, but he didn't. Instead, Dean bent down and picked up the raggedy old tape box from between the seats.

"When I was stuck in that basement, you know when I was dreaming…. Meyers said a few things I didn't tell you about right when I first woke up."

Rummaging through the box loudly, _too_ loudly like the traffic light would change to green at the sound of Dean Winchester preoccupied. When he pulled one out at random, Dean put the tape in the player, but didn't start it and turned the volume knob all the way to the left. "What'd he say, Sammy?"

He shifted uncomfortably in the black leather, bucket seats of the Impala. Not able to look at his brother, Sam turned his head to stare out of the window. "He asked me about when I was twelve, when I ruined your baseball bat."

It was like Dean had been turned into a pod person, for he nodded his head politely and sat back in his own seat – but then glared death at the stubborn traffic light. "Yeah, and what'd you say?"

"I was angry he brought it up, so nothing nice."

The sun rise was beautiful, Sam thought, and was happy to have it as an excuse to not focus on Dean and his staring contest with the stop-and-go light. But the orange and red rays of the climbing star hurt his eyes, refracting off the ocean water behind the trees like a thousand shards of mirror beneath a glaring fluorescent bulb. Not wanting his vision to fizzle out on him, Sam turned his head forward to stare at the dash.

"But that's not why you mention it," Dean pushed gently. "Is it, Sammy?" Maybe he was only being this nice because of the traffic light (doing anything to keep his mind off of it, to keep sane), but Sam kind of liked it.

Still, he sighed and shut his eyes. "No."

"Look, Sammy, if you don't feel comfortable being completely honest with me about every last thing, then–"

"Meyers said that you were sick, really sick, and that you'd be 'clocking out' within the next month or so. He also said that you've known about it for a long time now, that when you go out for coffee you swallow a few hundred pills from your endless supply. He said that you haven't told me about it because you think I'm too fragile for something like that."

Dean laughed, a warm and loving sound straight from his gut. It also made it impossible to believe that he was soundlessly mouthing very dirty words at the stop-and-go light. "Sammy, I'm perfectly fine. Meyers only said those things to rile you up, probably to make you stay in that basement for ever, to make you his pet."

"Really?" Sam turned to him. "You're not lying? You haven't been keeping this from me at all, not wanting me to know and flip out on you?"

Snorting, Dean shook his head. "The only sickness in me, buddy, is insomnia… and an obsession with gummies, but you have that too. God, Sammy, I can't believe you'd fall for anything that came from his mouth. It's like being on that airplane all over again – bad people say horrible things that just aren't true."

Sam was looking at him with an unamused expression on his face.

Dean frowned. "I love you, kid. I highly doubt I'd keep something as big as a fatal illness from you."

Smiling softly, though not absolutely convinced, Sam was going to reply when he heard Dean's cell phone ringing from the backseat. He reached for it as Dean began to _finally _drive further away from Georgetown, Maine, and stared at the glowing text message screen like it was about to bite him.

"Dad?"

Settling himself back in his seat, Sam nodded and pulled out the travel atlas from the glove compartment. "It's definately not Carlie."

Dean laughed. "So, where to?" he asked, watching his brother closely as the brunette read over the text message and compared the coordinates with the map.

"A place called Dean's Going to Be Driving for Days On End."

Dean snapped his jaw at the rearview mirror, at the fading traffic light. "I wish he wouldn't make us do this, drive clear across the country to humor his little whims."

Sam didn't hear his complaint, though, he was too busy staring at his brother's phone. Resonating in his head, half convinced it was coming from the phone itself and not memory, were two simple words, innocent enough when separated but together something awful.

"_Electric shock, electric shock, electric s h o c k…."_

_**Curtain**_

* * *

I'm not explaining myself. This story was written mainly to entertain myself during the break, and then I read a few spoilers which poisoned my brain (and I just know they're totally off, meaning I'll have to amend parts of this story again once the new episodes commence). If you've read those spoilers as well, you know what I've been talking about, if not… you'll find out soon enough.

Thank you to every last one of you who's read this story and reviewed (those who haven't, I don't like you as much because I really would have liked to know your thoughts on this, but I'd still kiss you under mistletoe). This story was amazingly fun to write, I just hope you had as much joy in reading it. It's going to be sad letting this baby go.


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